Constructing Personas: Realizing Social Media Profiles Through Designed Artifacts
Hali Pollard
The social media user profile is equated to a persona, a tool commonly used to make assumptions about a user’s behavior and experiences. This persona is a representation of the ideal, and social media are designed to embrace persona performativity by facilitating the construction of self-presentation in a metaphysical space. By reiterating often gendered acts, the body becomes an artificial gender over time, perpetuating societal norms and expectations that govern our bodies and maintain pre-existing power structures. Designing artifacts that construct personas in a physical form, we can challenge our understanding of identity and our participation in the power structure, and work toward reversing our behavior.
Self Portrait Photography Book
This book contains six personas loosely inspired by female archetypes in media. Through everyday performative strategies such as makeup, dress, and editing photos, a singular identity transcends and transforms itself in multiple ways, challenging the way we judge and place meaning on photos of others.
The Person(a) Probe
This cultural probe included three activities to help participants identify methods they use to curate and construct their online self through a color coded profile; they constructed personas for other people by viewing and interpreting their profile grid as well as reading the ones written about them by other participants.
Coded Profiles
Users coded the content and methods of curating their online person. While each is unique, participants were both enlightened and uncomfortable to see their profile in a coded, physical form.
Body As A Tool
An archeological and epistemological investigation of “performance.” I observed how the body is a tool and vehicle for this, transcending its form and becoming a crucial artifact for non-verbal communication. Through the hands, eyes, mouth, and feet, the body not only communicates emotions but cultural and societal differences as well.
Create a Person(a) Installation
Participants control the construction of identity, then place meaning on the persona they created, becoming aware of their role as an audience. The narrative placed on the personas aren't solely based on appearance, but also on the participant's, or audiences, own experiences, background, and biases.