Rosemarie Gresham Follow

Role

Ideation, UI, filming

Duration

1 week

Team

Robyn Goodridge

A Little Context

Speculative Design

This project was part of a senior speculative design class, and applies the lens of critical design to pose a critique within the provocation of "privacy and security". We further contextualized to focus in on the increasingly blurred lines between our private lives and our public social media persona.

Defamiliarizaiton

A key aspect of cirtical design is the concept of "complicated pleasure", where the design simultaneously intrigues and repulses. We wanted to create a world where the technology looked almost exactly like what we see today, but with an unsettling twist in the underlying motives and values.

The Project

#NoFilter

We wanted to explore the ways that social media encourages use to be more public about our private lives. As we seek to expand our online networks we make our content accessible to increasingly unfamiliar people and expect validation at faster intervals.

The friend/follower count has become a status symbol, and numbers in the 1000s are considered desirable. Services where one can buy followers on platforms like Instagram have proliferated over the past few years. However, we hypothesized that a higher follower count doesn't actually lead to higher levels of satisfaction, and our willingness to blur the lines between our public and private lives for the sake of recognition may have detrimental effects on our behavioural and psychological well-being.

So what would happen if we completely removed the barrier between ourselves and our social media profiles?

Dark Instagram

Imagine the perfectly curated Instagram grid without having to lift a finger. Enter Follow, available now on iOS and Android!

Your followers will be notified whenever you're nearby

Map mode helps your followers find you so they can snap a pic

Camera mode includes a compass to help orient followers to your location

Review shots before they're posted - gotta have that quality control

Pics will be posted to your profile, but don't worry the photographer will always get a credit

Photo grids are entirely populated by photos of you taken by your followers - see how much they care!