Improvable, Invisible, Believable and Augmentable:
“Improvable, Invisible, Believable and Augmentable” investigates dishonest behaviors related to the use of social media as a way to manage reputation, to craft online identities and to augment real-world relationships. The project aims to discover design implications to future social networks that incorporates the affordance for such behavior as part of the user experience.
The project is informed by an on-going discourse about social media users’ virtual identity and its security resulted from the increasingly publicized personal data, and is greatly inspired by anecdotes and stories of using technologies to selectively hide from and lie to members in one’s virtual network for varied social purposes, which also has an impact on one’s real-world relationships.
Two questions have emerged and have driven the observational and analytical research that follows: (1)Can these behaviors inspire the design of social networks? (2)What should the design also afford as one’s virtual and physical identities collide or overlap with each other?
These researches have led to the summary of four main typographies of dishonest behaviors and their outcomes, namely the ‘improvable me’, the ‘invisible me’, the ‘believable me’ and the ‘augmentable me’. A design prototype for new experiences of social networking is created based on these identity models. Using the speculative research method, a narration is composed to contemplate the approaches and problems of the design by putting it into a series of imagined happenings.
