Potential Futures of Social Media : A Speculative Design Approach to Instagram

Abstract: Instagram has around two billion registered users at the time of writing. This puts a lot of responsibility on interaction designers as they implement changes to the user experience. This thesis proposes a speculative approach to evaluate how potential futures might alter interactive features on Instagram and in turn, how that might nurture user habits. The thesis presents a framework and model to construct plausible structures of social media platforms and is in this project used to construct four scenarios through which speculative design work is done. The model could also guide future iterations and speculations.