My Role:
Research, interview, and co-design facilitation, project communications, synthesis, ideation, concept generation, storyboarding, prototyping, and presentation
Duration:
8 weeks
Team:
Shivani Singh, Maxime Stinnett
Advisors:
Minnie Bredouw, Dana Ragazeous, Jason Linder
Where we started—
The Problem Space
The work required to manage a professional career as an artist can be overwhelming and draining as it eats into the creative reserves that artists need to safeguard to fuel their personal practice.
With this project, we aimed to design an intervention for this need — to create the opportunity for artists to sustain their practice, personally and professionally in an increasingly digital age.
Thanks to our research and co-design participants — Matt Silady, Sean Stillwell, Emily Eisenhart, Eliana Athayde, Kassa Overall, Drew Van Diest, Susan Worthman.
The Process
We navigated multiple stages of divergence and convergence, which helped us discover, conceptualize, iterate, prototype, and test our ideas and assumptions.
How might we help artists thrive* in the digital age?
*in the context of community & financial income
Insights and opportunities from the research—
1.
Connecting virtually feels less authentic than meeting in person because there is often more context in a physical environment.
How might we bring more context into online discovery?
2.
Although artists often create independently, their work relies on the inspiration and promotional opportunities afforded by a strong community.
How might we help artists maintain networks wherein they feel a sense of belonging?
3.
The nature of creative work increases the aptitude for adapting to new skills, which appears to be a growing need in the current landscape of work.
How might we help artists integrate their work into adjacent fields?
The framework for our outcome—
Where we landed—
A reimagined 3-tiered networking interface for creators on LinkedIn that includes —
A new profile layout tailored to creative professional achievements, goals, and needs.
Radar—An alternative way to experience our communities spatially, on the basis of locational and skill-based proximity.
DropIn—An AR tool that facilitates sharing, and happenstance discovery, of artwork.
Wireframing our ideas—
Key features and user flows—
Setting up a creative profile
- Choose a more project-specific layout, instead of the standard LinkedIn layout
- Upload creative projects with relevant media, and include specifics like location, team, budget, funding, tools, etc. This can increase the speed of making connections — potential studio locations, creative professionals, sources for grants.
- 'Contact for work' with details about time constraints and budget upfront to help filter project opportunities.
Radar — exploring connections
- A dynamic visual representation of the community, adjustable by changing filters like "looking for", "can help with", and "needs help with"
- The Radar functionality aims to promote authentic sharing of professional skills, needs, and goals while helping you find what you're looking for.
DropIn — The AR in ARt
- Artists can scan/record and upload their work with a short description for those who discover it
- They can then decide on the extent to which they want to share it.
- All that's left is finding the right location, placing, and dropping the artwork for others to find.
DropIn — Discovery
- When a viewer discovers a piece of art, they can find out more about the artist and the work as they view it.
- Artists and viewers can both use a map view to track new art and plan art-walks of their own.
With this wizard-of-oz style video we had some fun prototyping the DropIn user experience, and how it might potentially result in happenstance encounters within the artist community.
Our main question evolved on the basis of our research to become—
How might we create a networking platform that evokes a sense of belonging for artists?
Here's where we saw another opportunity—
Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn's Mission:
To connect the world's professionals
to make them more productive and successful
During the research phase, we had the option to consider our design through the lens of an existing brand. After conducting a competitive analysis and workshopping the potential of existing networking brands with our research participants,
we learned that despite the powerful tool that LinkedIn can be, it is not working for many creative professionals.
"LinkedIn makes me feel gross!"
Matt, comics artist & educator
"My network is my resource"
Susan, business professional
39%
users pay for Premium
20mil.
companies listed
14mil.
open jobs
90%
recruiters on the platform
🍌 Self-critique—
Feedback +
Evaluation
Undertaking an iterative and participatory process ensured that we continuously checked and evaluated our designs through feedback from our 6 interviewees and others in our network.
After our co-design session, we expanded our concept with DropIn and asked our participants to give us their reactions and opinions on the changes —adding to our overall learnings and reflections on this process.
🍌 Research never stops
The scope of our challenge was vast. We made sure not to silo our ideation and prototyping phases and used our co-design session to test ourselves even during the design phase. As it stands, our idea would benefit from more testing to uncover the success metrics of features that have been added to increase discoverability and financial opportunities for creative professionals.
🍌 Creativity is expansive
I struggle with our distinction between 'default' and 'creative' profiles because creativity isn't a category. Ideally, users shouldn't need to box themselves in, one way or another. The case for a more portfolio-like layout for creative professionals on a powerful networking platform like LinkedIn exists, but there needn't be such a finality to the choice a user has to make upfront.
🍌 Technical considerations
In an ideal world, I would love the time to test for the potential misuse of this product. Some key questions I would ask are—
"What privacy controls does a user have?"
"How is original artwork being protected and secured against plagiarism and theft?"
"What restrictions can we enforce to avoid spam or a sensory overload?"
More snapshots of our process—
Through our time on this project, we did different things to stay inspired.
- We sought analogous inspiration at the Soft Power exhibit at SF MoMA,
- conducted experiments like pop-up hallway surveys as we had the advantage of being in a (then) bustling art school,
- had an on-going catalog of artist communities and maker-spaces to look into,
- and most importantly, we made a rigorous attempt to generate design ideas and concepts as we progressed.