Students’ use of social media in collaborative design: a case study of an advanced interior design studio

Critical Analysis

Design students commonly work on projects in groups. Many artifacts created during the design process are digital, and students require tools that support their groupwork on and around those artifacts. Students need to share digital artifacts, discuss them while gesturing or pointing at them, critique them, and build on them. In a physical environment, this form of collaboration might occur on printouts or tangible models. In a digital context, mediating tools (software) are necessary in order to foster that form of collaboration. Digital artifacts also enable remote work, where team members can work from different locations, and so mediating software needs to support the nuances of creative remote work, too.

There are many productivity software tools that have been created to help knowledge workers work together. These may focus on file management, collaborative editing of documents or presentations, or workflow management for process-based tasks. Historically, there have been few software tools created explicitly with the intention of supporting collaborative design work, and it is likely that other tools are used instead. Social media platforms are often used to share visual content, and these tools might be appropriate for working with the visual materials produced during a design project.

Researchers Cho and Cho worked to understand if and how these tools are being used in the context of studio-based education. Their research goals were to understand what social media tools are used by students, what features are used, what processes are used, and what are the ideal features needed for a hypothetical new collaborative design tool. They conducted their research after the completion of a typical and intense studio project, where students in groups worked through complex problem solving. Their data collection method relied on retrospective, self-reported analysis by students, and the results are questionable in their validity and sparse in detail. However, they identified some findings that underly the use of social media tools in an educational studio context.

First, the authors confirmed that students are using social media tools in ways that these tools were not intended. It’s hypothesized that the visual nature of these tools makes them uniquely suited for design efforts. Additionally, students tend to avoid tools focused on content creation, content editing, or file management, and instead leverage tools that help them acquire ideas and inspiration, share images, and discuss and share opinions. The authors also noted that, since the students use a variety of tools from a variety of companies, there was no seamless or smooth integration between platforms, and because the social media platforms are intended for quick and lightweight browsing, those platforms don’t support large CAD or Photoshop files; email is used instead, and email does not integrate with platforms like Pinterest or Instagram.

This study was completed in 2020. Figma introduced Figjam in 2016, and it’s curious that this software title was not mentioned in the study. This is likely because the authors led the students towards “social media” tools, and Figjam, Miro and Mural are typically considered collaborative canvases. Figma and Figjam have become defacto collaborative working spaces for designers, and the enormous marketshare of these tools has likely eliminated the practical value of many of the findings from this study. The third recommendation from the authors is that “social media developers enhance functions that will seamlessly support multiple purposes for effective design collaboration,” and that’s precisely what has emerged in collaborative canvases.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Highlights the limitations of retrospective and self-reported analysis in producing meaningful research data
• Identifies a space for further research—better understanding the conversations and discussions happening with and on top of digital artifacts in a collaborative canvas (an analysis of Figma-based comments may be a useful data collection method to pursue.)