Anya Kamenetz. Facebook's own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health. NPR, October 2021. URL: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043138622/facebook-instagram-teens-mental-health (visited on 2023-12-08).

In what ways have you found social media bad for your mental health and good for your mental health? What responsibility do you think social media platforms have for the mental health of their users? Are there ways social media sites can be designed to be better for the mental health of its users? What are the ways social media companies monitoring of mental health could be beneficial or harmful?

[1] It isn’t clear what should be considered as “natural” selection in a social media environment (human nature? cultural biases, like racism? the nature of the design of the social media platform? are bots unnatural?), so we’ll just instead talk about selection.

Evolution of cetaceans. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1186568602. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evolution_of_cetaceans&oldid=1186568602 (visited on 2023-12-08).

Zack Whittaker. Facebook won't let you opt out of its phone number 'look up' setting. TechCrunch, March 2019. URL: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/03/facebook-phone-number-look-up/ (visited on 2023-12-07).

What people near you have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over (they can find your approximate location, like your city, from your internet IP address, and they may know even more precisely) This perhaps explains why sometimes when you talk about something out loud it gets recommended to you (because someone around you then searched for it). Or maybe they are actually recording what you are saying and recommending based on that.

Social model of disability. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1184222120. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_model_of_disability&oldid=1184222120#Social_construction_of_disability (visited on 2023-12-07).

There are many ways to think about disability, such as legal (what legally counts as a disability?), medical (what is a problem to be cured?), identity (who views themselves as “disabled”), etc. We are focused here more on disability as it relates to design and who things in our world are designed for.

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From a security perspective there are many risks that a company faces, such as: Employees at the company misusing their access, like Facebook employees using their database permissions to stalk women [i10] Hackers finding a vulnerability and inserting, modifying, or downloading information. For example: hackers stealing the names, Social Security numbers, and birthdates of 143 million Americans from Equifax [i11] hackers posting publicly the phone numbers, names, locations, and some email addresses of 530 million Facebook users [i12], or about 7% of all people on Earth

Web tracking. October 2023. Page Version ID: 1181294364. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_tracking&oldid=1181294364 (visited on 2023-12-05).

What was accurate, inaccurate, or surprising about your ad profile? How comfortable are you with Google knowing (whether correctly or not) those things about you?

Social media platforms then use “data mining” to search through all this data to try to learn more about their users, find patterns of behavior, and in the end, make more money.

Is It Funny or Offensive? Comedian Impersonates FBI on Twitter, Makes MLK Assassination Joke. January 2020. URL: https://isitfunnyoroffensive.com/comedian-impersonates-fbi-on-twitter-makes-mlk-assassination-joke/ (visited on 2023-12-05).

One of the traditional pieces of advice for dealing with trolls is “Don’t feed the trolls,” which means that if you don’t respond to trolls, they will get bored and stop trolling. We can see this advice as well in the trolling community’s own “Rules of the Internet” [g31]: Do not argue with trolls - it means that they win

lonelygirl15. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1186146298. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lonelygirl15&oldid=1186146298 (visited on 2023-11-24).

Do you think it matters which human typed the Tweet? Does the emotional expression (e.g., anger) of the Tweet change your view of authenticity?

Bulletin board system. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1184559343. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bulletin_board_system&oldid=1184559343 (visited on 2023-11-24).

5.2.1. Email# One of the early ways of social communication across the internet was with Email [e5], which originated in the 1960s and 1970s. These allowed people to send messages to each other, and look up if any new messages had been sent to them. 5.2.2. Bulletin board system (BBS)# In the 1980s and 1990s, Bulletin board system (BBS) [e6] provided more communal ways of communicating and sharing messages. In these systems, someone would start a “thread” by posting an initial message. Others could reply to the previous set of messages in the thread.

Twitter. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1187856185. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter (visited on 2023-12-01).

Can you think of an example of pernicious ignorance in social media interaction? What’s something that we might often prefer to overlook when deciding what is important?

Steven Tweedie. This disturbing image of a Chinese worker with close to 100 iPhones reveals how App Store rankings can be manipulated. February 2015. URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-shows-how-fake-app-store-rankings-are-made-2015-2 (visited on 2024-03-07).

Some bots are intended to be helpful, using automation to make tasks easier for others or to provide information, such as: Auto caption: https://twitter.com/headlinerclip [c3] Vaccine progress: https://twitter.com/vax_progress [c4] Blocking groups of people: https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_ [c5] Social Media managing programs that help people schedule and coordinate posts Delete old tweets: https://tweetdelete.net/ [c6] See a new photo of a red panda every hour: https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr [c7] Bots might have significant limits on how helpful they are, such as tech support bots you might have had frustrating experiences with on various websites.

How often do you hear phrases like “social media isn’t real life”?

There are absolute moral rules and duties to follow (regardless of the consequences). They can be deduced by reasoning about the objective reality.

User control and freedom is the principle that people will take many paths through an interface (not always the intended ones), and so wherever they end up, they should be able to return to where they came from or change their mind. The notions of “Cancel” and “Undo” are the best examples of user control and freedom: they allow users to change their mind if they ended up in a state they didn’t want to be in. The dialog below is a major violation of this principle; it gives all of the power to the computer:

The same applies if a participant asks you questions: you can’t answer them, because you wouldn’t normally be there to help. The design should do the teaching.

The Google search page actually accepts many other implicit inputs too. There are a variety of personalization settings, such as search history, search preferences, and even sensor input (such as your location) that it also accepts as input. The user interface doesn’t provide explicit controls for providing this input, but it is user input nonetheless. These implicit inputs contain issues of justice. For example, what harms may come by Google tracking your location when you search? For many, no harm, but what about people do not secure their accounts, and might be stalked by a violent ex, or someone in witness protection?

The fastest and easiest form of prototype is a sketch, which is a low-fidelity prototype that’s created by hand. See the drawing at the top of this page? That’s a sketch. Get good at using your hands to draw things that you want to create so that you can see them, communicate them, and evaluate them. With enough skill, people can sketch anything, and they almost always do it faster than in any other media. On the other hand, because they have the least detail of any prototype (making them low-fidelity), they’re most useful at the beginning of a design process.

User experiences can be evaluated with qualitative and/or quantitative measures. Your decision of qualitative and/or quantitative presentation of your findings may depend on the type of data captured, who will be viewing your research, and whether qualitative or quantitative data will be easier to understand.

An example of a contrast effect can be seen in a Pew Research Center poll conducted in October 2003, a dozen years before same-sex marriage was legalized in the U.S. That poll found that people were more likely to favor allowing gays and lesbians to enter into legal agreements that give them the same rights as married couples when this question was asked after one about whether they favored or opposed allowing gays and lesbians to marry (45% favored legal agreements when asked after the marriage question, but 37% favored legal agreements without the immediate preceding context of a question about same-sex marriage). Responses to the question about same-sex marriage, meanwhile, were not significantly affected by its placement before or after the legal agreements question.

There are several things to notice about the exchange above. It’s respectful, with each person listening and accepting what the other person is saying. It’s collaborative, with each person contributing knowledge to the conversation. It’s grounded in design rationale and design judgement, focusing on why choices are made and why different choices were made, and how that might effect the success of the solution.

However, most societies do not value creative thinking and so our skills in generating ideas rapidly atrophies, as we do not practice it, and instead actively learn to suppress it1

Some design scholars are skeptical about human-centered design because they don’t believe modeling and verifying people’s needs through a few focused encounters is sufficient to actually address people’s problems, or systems of activities1212 Norman, D. A. (2005). Human-centered design considered harmful. ACM interactions. . These and other critiques lead to a notion of participatory design 1010 Muller, M. J., & Kuhn, S. (1993). Participatory design. Communications of the ACM. , in which designers not only try to understand the problems of stakeholders, but recruiting stakeholders onto the design team as full participants of a design process. This way, the people you’re designing for are always represented throughout the design process. The key challenge of participatory design is finding stakeholders that can adequately represent a community’s needs, while also participating meaningfully in a design process.

Capturing these models of problems is essential in design contexts where designers are separate from stakeholders; the models can act as a form of boundary object22 Barrett, M., and Oborn, E. (2010). Boundary object use in cross-cultural software development teams. Human Relations. , helping designers work with other people, like developers, product managers, project managers, marketers, and others to understand who is being helped and why. But from a design justice perspective, one might wonder what the value of articulating a persona, scenario, or problem statement in words is. Wouldn’t everyone in the community you’re servicing understand these problems intuitively, from their lived experience? Even in a community, everyone is different: coming to agreement on who is being served, why they are being served, and what one believes is causing the problem, and how it impacts a particular group, is key to focusing design efforts.

hat means that problems are inherently tied to specific groups of people that wish their situation was different. Therefore, you can’t define a problem without being very explicit about whose problem you’re addressing. And this requires more than just choosing a particular category of people (“Children! Students! The elderly!”), which is fraught with harmful stereotypes. It requires taking quite seriously the question of who are you trying to help and why, and what kind of help do they really need? And if you haven’t talked to the people you’re trying to help, then how could you possibly know what their problems are, or how to help them with design?

Given all of these skills, and the immense challenges of enacting them in ways that are just, inclusive, anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-ableist, how can one ever hope to learn to be a great designer? Ultimately, design requires practice. And specifically, deliberate practice33 Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Ršmer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review. . You must design a lot with many stakeholders, in many contexts, and get a lot of feedback throughout.