Hugh is a UX/UI Designer with a background in computer science and business. He believes in well-considered, useful design grounded in an understanding of the people affected by it and a strong theoretical base. This need to understand first is what motivates him, and he strives for design that is an honest embodiment of the supporting research.
One of the reasons he chose UX is for its highly social element – beyond working in teams, the opportunity to learn about people is something that he really values. He finds himself using design as a way to interrogate certain aspects of the lives around him, as well as his own.
Ti: An LGBTQ+ Social Network
Ti is a research and design project that focuses on the interplay of identity, queerness, and social networking. It revolves around a central research question: what role do social networking sites play in the formation and maintenance of queer identity?
Lacking the formal institutions that usually assist enculturation, queer people must actively seek out and construct identity and community, which increasingly happens on social networking sites. These spaces make it possible for people to experiment with different subjectivities, which in turn are integrated into offline identities.
Despite widespread use, many social platforms have issues of ‘fit’, which can limit expression in a number of ways. Ti seeks to remedy this in creating a social network that is grounded in identity building. It seeks to address findings such as: dating apps filling the role of missing community spaces; and, users seeking queer representation with irregular success. Ti also looks to include larger infrastructural queer-specific needs in the design narrative, such as platform moderation and data protection.
Protection Commitment: http://bit.ly/tiprotection
Ti is a research and design project that focuses on the interplay of identity, queerness, and social networking. It revolves around a central research question: what role do social networking sites play in the formation and maintenance of queer identity?
Lacking the formal institutions that usually assist enculturation, queer people must actively seek out and construct identity and community, which increasingly happens on social networking sites. These spaces make it possible for people to experiment with different subjectivities, which in turn are integrated into offline identities.
Despite widespread use, many social platforms have issues of ‘fit’, which can limit expression in a number of ways. Ti seeks to remedy this in creating a social network that is grounded in identity building. It seeks to address findings such as: dating apps filling the role of missing community spaces; and, users seeking queer representation with irregular success. Ti also looks to include larger infrastructural queer-specific needs in the design narrative, such as platform moderation and data protection.
Protection Commitment: http://bit.ly/tiprotection