The SmallSocial Web
Public digital spaces are essential for encouraging public discourse, community engagement, and collective action, providing individuals with a platform to express themselves, seek support, learn from others, and collaborate on shared challenges or common interests.
Inspired by Editor X's article on a small group of creatives dedicated to designing a more compassionate digital future, my curiosity led me to explore an intervention that emphasizes the importance of shaping our digital environment, much like we do with our physical spaces. The project involves a field guide with speculative interactions, aiming to replicate the experiences of a small social web in two distinct settings.
Year
2023
Type
Speculative Research & Design
Mentor
Prof. Paul Anthony George
I look at field guides as a lightweight manual that makes it easier for people to understand what my intent with the context is just before I head out to the field. It gives me, as a researcher a sense of direction on how I would want to go about my micro context. The idea is to give readers a peek into what a small web-like world would feel like when designed to be open, creative, autonomous, and experimental and that runs without the baggage of user attention or generating engagement, capitalism, and surveillance.
I look at field guides as a lightweight manual that makes it easier for people to understand what my intent with the context is just before I head out to the field. It gives me, as a researcher a sense of direction on how I would want to go about my micro context. The idea is to give readers a peek into what a small web-like world would feel like when designed to be open, creative, autonomous, and experimental and that runs without the baggage of user attention or generating engagement, capitalism, and surveillance.
The field guide borrows aspects of a park-like experience and puts them across interactions on the small social web. Parks are one of the physical public spaces around us that we come across almost everyday (I live in Bangalore and this has been my observation on parks). They consist of playgrounds, spaces to sit in, and gardens. Parks are not designed with the idea of surveillance or control and essentially encourage exploration, play, and community building.
These are some of the characteristics that have been put forward through the proposed field guide. The concept was to give people the essence of going through a digital space like a webpage but in a more tangible physical form that of a book/ zine.
The Field guide
Introduction to the small social web. Dissecting the terms small | social | web, Characteristics of the space.
Familiarizing people with small social web
Community guidelines, Glossary, Interactions
Conversations and Interactions to experience the notion of the small social web (in the context of a park metaphor).
Field notes, The free verse poem
To Initiate questions, ideas, thoughts and feelings post experiencing the space.
Form: Physical Zine
Feel: Should feel like going through a website that guides you to the space and its function one by one.
Intention: Inculcate a slow behavior of readers while they engage with the field guide.
The Field guide
Form: Physical Zine
Feel: Should feel like going through a website that guides you to the space and its function one by one.
Intention: Inculcate a slow behavior of readers while they engage with the field guide.
Introduction to the small social web. Dissecting the terms small | social | web, Characteristics of the space.
Familiarizing people with small social web
Community guidelines, Glossary, Interactions
Conversations and Interactions to experience the notion of the small social web (in the context of a park metaphor).
Field notes, The free verse poem
To Initiate questions, ideas, thoughts and feelings post experiencing the space.
The Interactions
For engaging people with the small social web, the field guide also inculcates two interactions:
(i) One with the space (digital spaces) and the other
(ii) With people (conversations or communication online); that give readers an understanding of what are some potential experiences the they can gage with as they explore the small social web concept.
(i) The first interaction is called ‘Like Benches in a Park’ which offers an immersive space for people to Interact in an online public space. Almost every day we strangle our screens with a pattern of how conversations with people take place in a public digital space. There are profiles made, chat windows created, and a stack of text layers for showing the order in which one came first and which one in the end.
The idea of ‘Like benches in a park’ is to indicate an open park-like space where the conversations are organic, without the constraints of rigid structures or predetermined hierarchies. It suggests a space where people can come together, sit down, and engage with each other on an equal footing - sharing ideas, and interests, and forming communities in a more transparent manner.
The intention was to observe and experiment on how do people create and form communities on an open space like this, how do they comment?, how do they gratify?, how do they highlight and interact with each other?.
(a)
(b)
Fig 1.1 - (a) & (b) Screenshots of responses
(ii) ‘Like pathways in a park’ is a gradient color-based community engagement space that offers people an immersive and interactive experience as they explore different communities. The design is centered around the concept of pathways, and encourages visitors to explore the space in a way that mimics a walk through a park.
By using a gradient color-based theme, the space creates a visual representation of different communities that are scattered across the color gradients and are embedded within each of the color hex codes - providing people with a less rigid space structure and a more authentic yet explorative experience of the social web.
People essentially need to walk around in their physical spaces to find communities around them. The color gradient changes as they move around, and the communities only pop up as you go closer towards them. The arrow cursor essentially acts like a location pin for the person moving around in real time.
(a)
(b)
Fig 1.2 - (a) Prototype on Figma , (b) Live demo
The project "Reimagining a Public Digital Space: The Small Web Edition" has been a journey of exploration and discovery into the potential of the small social web. Through Netnographic studies, surveys, observations, and discussion sessions, the project has been collated into a field guide that brings together key concepts for people to understand and engage with. The future of the small social web is promising as people seek out alternative digital spaces that aren't driven solely by profit and data collection, and we delve deeper into its possibilities.
This project serves as a conversation starter for those interested in exploring the creative and experimental side of the smaller side of the web through a tangible artefact like a field guide.
Here with the concept of the small social web the focus is on creating communities equivalent to creating kinship and in some sense experimenting with an abstract form of communication - where people can get to go beyond the institutional boundaries of a platform and challenge the notions of what an open web space can do.
However, the idea is to co-create spaces on the small social web that foster the notion of public good. This can lead to a more open and inclusive online environment where people can come together to collaborate, learn from one another, and work towards common goals, all while fostering a sense of belonging and community that goes beyond the templatized kinship structures that we get to experience today.
