Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design

Facebook Project

Authoring Critical Media

The exercise is to use the social network website Facebook as a subject, by re-introducing it in a way to change the perspectives of a familiar media.

At the early observation phase, I found the layout of Facebook seemed to consist many different information, but in fact there were mainly divided in two categories: Social relationships from individual perspective, and commercial profit from corporation perspective. Therefore, I modified and divided the web page into two colors, which were red and green. I used 3D glasses as a tool of perspective filter so people would see different information by using different color of lens. The purpose was to revel the fact and to highlight different perspectives for different groups of people.

To me, the experiment is not quite successful mainly because the gist was a known fact. Even thought the technique was somewhat intriguing, the content was not able to raise questions and leave a room for discussion. However, the experience was still quite valuable. In this experiment, design was a way of communication, a way to deliver an idea. The balance is crucial. At what degree can design properly deliver message without disturbing the original intension is an important lesson.