Build Her Up, Don’t Tear Her Down

Visual Design, Physical Computing, & Research

Background

• Target Audience: girls in their childhood, teenage and women exposed to media’s portrayals of body images

• Partner with visual designer, Amanda Spilker

Problem / Why?

With current portrayals of girls’ body images (advertisements, photoshop culture), women of many age groups feel inclined to conform to society’s version of beauty and youthfulness, despite being the toughest critic of oneself. In order to avoid body shaming by other female counterparts, girls and women are beginning to lose sight of a body conducive to a life of positivity.

Opportunities

• How might we promote and support the positivity of body image while omitting negativity?

• How might we normalize the ultimate idea of girls and women supporting one another?

Inspiration and Research

Design Process / How?

1. Exploring themes around body positivity

   Research activities: Academic research on permanent beauty, media’s portrayal of beauty and body image, and the culture of advertising, ethnographic research, and interviews with teen girls

   Phase results: According to our research, teen girls love for their bodies plummet because advertising agencies and beauty industries keep setting gaps of where teen girls are and where teen girls should be with their body images. Girls are very harsh on their body images by nature as they compare themselves to others, when in fact, a lot of the people around us pay the most attention to our positive, beautiful features. Nevertheless, competition always exists among girls, particularly in regards to body images. Our challenge was to drive behavioural change within the community of girls and women.

2. Defining our target audience’s interactions with the social campaign Empowhering

   Research activities:

   (1) Specifying the types of action required to transform negativity to positivity amongst girls and women

   (2) Developing a poster that would educate the public with consequences of body negativity

   (3) Examining various social media and tools that would best promote the message of body positivity to teen girls age 14-20

   Why Instagram?

   • The hashtag system would make it easy for posts to reach a large audience.

   • We intend to allow for more responses between strangers within the scope of body positivity, in hopes of building a community where girls empower each other.

   • Posting a photo on Instagram has the option of posting to all linked social media accounts, including Twitter and Facebook.

3. Establishing success metrics of the social campaign

   (1) Instagram engagement per follower

   (2) Instagram follower growth

   (3) Comments received each Instagram post

   (4) Number of Instagram mentions

   (5) Instagram hashtag #girlssupportgirls usage

   (6) Number of petitions signed

4. Empowhering landing page: Compliment, don’t criticize

   Phase results: We designed a landing page that introduced the social challenge and a petition to grow a community of confidence and love. By signing this petition, users would pledge to take a moment each day to tell someone in their life they were beautiful.

5. Empowhering poster: Build her up, don’t tear her down

   Phase results: Inspired by building blocks, this poster was designed to shed a positive light upon various body shapes, while promoting the idea of building each other up. It consisted of three points of interactions (‘buttons’), where audience could press and hear three quick statistics regarding consequences of body negativity. Charcoal was selected as the conductive material to connect between the poster and the physical computing components.

6. Empowhering Instagram: Shout out to the girls who value self-love and healthy bodies

   Phase results: With the help of influencers (Dove Real Beauty Campaign, Michelle Obama, Ted Talk etc.), we generated over 20 posts to promote the importance of compliments, a community of loving girls, and self-love.

Instagram @empowheringcampaign

Empowhering landing page

Final Prototype(s) / What?

What did I learn?

• Driving social change has always been one of my passions as a designer. Being a harsh critique on my own body image as well, this project drove me to seek out my friend group for emotional support.

• Never give up in troubleshooting the code. When in doubt, ask for help!

• Jumper wires can lead to flaky signals.

What would I have done differently?

• Though this project remained in its prototype stage, it is still worth considering other assets to the social campaign. For example, a video narrative with a true story between girls expressing their views on their bodies and finding a support community.

• My partner and I would fully develop the landing page with a video narrative and a blog to continue building the online community, if given more time.

• Once a community with sufficient members is established, we can potentially schedule an in-person meet up within GTA to expand the movement.