Audience

My audience are primarily people who change their cultural environments

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The transformation of the digital self isn`t only based on the work of the designer. It is the recipient with its personal cultural and social background which decides how to see us. 

My theory is that expats who have shaped their public persona in one cultural environment and move to another one, experience the  transformation of the digital-self more than other people. We have no idea how data which are publicly available about us may come back to our life, especially when it is misunderstood by people whose context we don`t know. Internationals therefore represent the target audience of my major project as they are exposed to those cultural perceptions and distortions every day.

In an experiment I asked around 10 people from different nationalities who had individual pre-knowledge about Berlin to describe the city in a metaphor.  I received 10 very different metaphors. From a light “soft balloon” via a “package of chocolate” to a “big village packed with people”. I believe these images were constructed from interactions people had had with Berlin and the type of experiences and information they had had about it already before. Such images certainly have an impact on how people perceive a city and may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Someone told us for example that Berlin is a little less exciting than London and so we continously compare. Someone else might have told us that Berlin is known for its diversity and suddenly we see a very diverse crowd of people when we are there, just because we are primed on this topic.

Such a feedback loop might also be experienced with the digital-self. Being confronted with people who have got a certain impression about us based on information which is available online can come back into our non-digital life. This experiment allowed me to become aware of my research question and to conduct further interviews.

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