DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

As social media becomes more universal, are we seeing a change in people’s perspectives?

0.1 Visual Perspective: People are looking down on their phones, which means a change in eye level. We are now viewing the world through the interpretation of a lens.

0.2 Mental and Social Perspective: People have changed the way they view an object or location. We actively seek certain places as places to be seen, a place to capture the picture perfect moment that we have created – ‘it’ll look good on the gram’.

This is all affecting the pressure of design – as social media is so instantaneous there is a constant evolution of whats in and whats out. There are new questions for designers and creators to consider – is social media the new circumstance to design around? Is this current network the new client?

Designers, architects and artists alike must respond to their immediate culture and situations in order to be a part of current conversations; and social media is a highly active contemporary platform.

If the world is now seeing things through a square lens, does design need to adapt to this formula?

Social media and design share the unifying characteristic of connecting people. We can see the influence of designs coming together from across borders. The difficulty for designers will be how to keep up with these ever-changing influences and to fuse this ever-growing network into their process.