The Green Tick Initiative: An Empathetic Look at Social Media's affect on Mental Health

Contemporary Design Culture: Week 5

This week brought with it a change of scenery. A new location for a special workshop with Blackbox Design Studio. We were separated into groups with the idea that in teams, we would develop an original idea and then pitch it to the class all in under four hours. An initially daunting task soon developed into a conversation between teammates about what we can do, as designers, to better the lives of the people around us.

Blackbox had developed there own creative process and wanted to give us an intensive crash-course detailing each of their creative stages, from initial concept to product marketing. Personally, I found this to be a much needed creative challenge. We had previously completed a studio creativity assignment and I had missed the absence of limitations when it came to our designs. This, coupled with real world applications, created an incredible experience for a design student. To be able to create an idea and carry it through it’s development and refinement stage until the final pitch, gives such a heightened sense of appreciation for the design process. This could be seen from when we had to select business-like roles and decide what we stood for, morally speaking. As the CEO together we decided to focus on Health and Wellbeing as I felt there was more scope to apply empathy based design and use my own experiences to help others.

In one stage of the project, we created sticky notes with different ideas and voted on them as a group. One of my concepts was to look at the relationship between body dysmorphia/ eating disorders and social media. While the rest of the team wanted to focus more on physical health rather than mental health, I knew this was a topic I cared about and needed to see through. While on break I decided to develop my idea further, so the team could better understand my concept and hopefully get on board with it. I eventually decided on an initiative that would teach people about positive social media use through a training programme as well as reward them upon completion of the programme. It’s called The Green Tick Initiative – social media rehabilitation through a scenario-based training programme. My hope was that this initiative would make social media a safe place for more vulnerable users as well as all users in general.

I loved this workshop, getting the opportunity to pitch the idea was a real learning experience. My favourite part of the whole workshop was being able to take my own experiences and turn them into something creative and worthwhile. As a potential user to my own concept, I was able to analyse what I would want to see and how it would realistically benefit me as well as ensure social media would never be a source of negativity. I hope to carry on my concept and see it through as far as I can, hopefully one day something like it will be capable of really helping people. Not many designers get the opportunity to conduct empathetic research and design on themselves, I’m just glad I got the chance to look inwards and as a result, create. For me, it was

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