Social networking sites are today playing an essential role in our daily lives. These web-based services not only focus on providing people a platform to share interests and activities, but also facilitate the process of keeping in touch with families and friends. Take Facebook, the most popular social networking website, as an example: people can add events on the ‘timeline’ of their friends, or press ‘like’ below the status of someone to show their supports. Functions like ‘timeline’ or ‘like’ are social features that enable people to interact with each other in a better way, as well as improve their experience of sharing and communication. Instead of using social media features, as a virtual way, to create interaction and communication between individuals, how can designers create a tangible way to express the current social networking interaction? Taking this question as a starting point, the graduation project aims to explore how "performative qualities" of materials can be used in social networking service, in order to support actions that promote social engagement between individuals. When talking about material application in the field of industrial design, one tends to focus on the manufacturing technologies of materials. Also, one might think about selecting and applying materials on the basis of their aesthetic qualities. It is a fact that materials do not only affect use and function of products, but also contribute to the creation of meaning and particular experience. (Karana, 2009). For example, a wooded cup that is warm and rough in touch, it could provide people a feeling of cozy; while a glass cup, on the other hand, would make people feel chilly because the tactility of this material is cold and smooth. Likewise, the different kinds of affordances of materials, which we call them ‘performative qualities’ in this project, might trigger and support different actions of people. For instance, “glass is for seeing through, and for breaking, wood is normally used for solidity, opacity, support or carving
”(Norman, 2002,p.9). On the other hand, much of the studies have been conducted relate to certain properties of the web. For instance, Rattenbury et al. suggests that the metaphor of ‘plastic’ captures the way in which computers have become integrated into the ‘heterogeneous rhythms of everyday life’. Based on this theory, Richard Harper argues two additional properties of the web, persistence and temporality, as a ‘digital material’
All these research point out that web, including social networking sites, is not in material but it does have a material quality. Based on the current research, We believe it is an interesting opportunity to understand how to use materials as resources for interaction design of social network. Therefore, the meaning of this project is twofold: 1) provide a new perspective for design researchers to understand the ‘performative qualities’ of materials; 2) provide practitioners with a robust reference toolkit to design for social interaction in a tangible way. This graduation project will uniquely combine lines of research in social interaction design (Prof. E. Giaccardi) and material experience (Dr. E. Karana) across the Departments of Industrial Design and Design Engineering of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. This graduation project will mainly focus on exploring how the ‘performative qualities’ of materials can be linked to social networking services, and it will result in designing a tangible toolkit as a supportive source to inspire designers for further exploration on social interaction design. Understand the current research on social features, ‘performative qualities’ of materials and ‘material qualities’ of web. Categorize the social features into groups and pick up one of the social features from each group for further exploration Carry out a study to investigate how people behave to express those social features Explore how materials support social actions in which people engage. Create a toolkit that is based on the research insights Evaluate the toolkit