Negotiating collaboration and commodification: the social media logic of co-design on Pinterest

ABSTRACT

This study presents an empirical case focused on the co-design activities of professional designers and client-stakeholders in the context of the social media platform Pinterest. Overall, this study finds that as Pinterest moves from a tool being used behind the scenes by designers as part of the creative process to a tool for co-designing with stakeholders, tensions emerge around the publicness and informal nature of communication through social media, the types of participation by stakeholders in the design process, and the complexities of quantified collaboration. In-depth interviews with professional designers and a multi-stakeholder team reveal a continuum of designer-stakeholder participation. These co-design practices are marked by social media logic, reconfigured roles of participation; and perceptions of platform design affordances. As such, these platform-specific co-design practices suggest new materialities and temporalities for collaborative design processes within a platform economy. Rather than focusing on a participatory design event, this study draws attention to the routine, everyday ways co-designing is occurring on Pinterest as part of design projects and the role this practice has in re-positioning co-design in the digital age.

KEYWORDS:

• Pinterest
• social media
• co-design
• design
• design professionals

Acknowledgments

I would like to express gratitude to the participants in this project who were so generous in sharing their experiences as a part of the in-depth interviews that I conducted. I am also grateful for the insightful feedback of the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The graphic designers interviewed are a subset of data from the author’s unpublished doctoral dissertation.