The personalisation of mass-produced devices is not something we overtly give much thought to, yet there are traces of it everywhere. Looking at virtually any device, you can almost hear the question batted back-and-forth amongst cloistered designers: How to create a sense of self? Or maybe, how to create a sense of a sense of self? Making things feel unique or tailored is one of the dominant features of the times. Our social media profiles match this broader sentiment too - they invite us to settle into the space and make it our own, encouraging us through vacant gaps to add images, bios and the like.
In many ways MySpace, the once sector leading but now largely forgotten social media platform, was built around that ideal. The profiles on there could be radically redesigned by the user, including the background and layout, and so each one looked quite different. Moving through profiles, it felt messy and disjointed, disorientating perhaps. It also felt like you were moving between spaces rather than seeing a big crowd in one massive room. The relative chaos and unseemly variation of styles may have been part of MySpace's undoing. It never quite felt coherent enough perhaps, or maybe it didn't quite appear like a shared space.
The more successful social media that replaced Myspace have tended to allow for personal touches within a more rigid structure. They are more like exhibits of the quotidian that take up specifically allocated frames on a gallery wall. A picture or image here or there, placed in specified zones, uploaded within a replicated framework - I once wrote of these frameworks as architectures of participation. Then the platform takes over the personalisation processes for us, making them more about consumption rather than production - with the targeted news feeds and so on.
This personalisation within a framework spreads into the materiality of the phone too. Phone cases, governed by the phone’s dimensions, are, of course, fashion accessories of sorts. There is now a significant phone case industry. The visible reverse of the phone can be adorned to make it stand out. Then, of course, there is the lock screen image and background. One issue with the iPhone is that even with such add-ons, one screen looks largely the same as the next. The possibilities for adapting the design and buying new screen appearances got some attention after a recent iOS update. With one notable styling of the icons and home screen getting particular attention and downloads. That Traf screen design and icons achieved large numbers of purchases within the first few days of launch - suggesting relatively high demand to adapt the home screen appearance.
Personalisation around a structure; that is perhaps the real motif here. Or maybe it is about a kind of aesthetic of personalisation, a look or feel of something unique. Here, though, it is about building-in just enough flexibility for personalisation to occur but without it breaking beyond certain carefully placed limits. The personalisation aesthetic is circumscribed to ensure it is contained and that there is just enough scope to mark that media form out from others without undermining a sense of the media's standardised properties. It might be interesting to think about the different limits that are placed around personalisation and the restrictions that dictate the extent to which appearances can adapt. This would be to look at what we have control of and what is fixed within media frameworks.
This example also suggests that within contemporary media their are personalisations that are conducted on our behalf, such as targeted content and news feeds, whilst there are also those personal touches that we are invited to participate in producing ourselves (within predetermined limits). Both social media and our mobile devices come with a circumscribed personalisation aesthetic. They have narrow frames in which we are encouraged to add a sense of self, but only within a particular set of affordances that maintain a kind of order and seemingly coherent architecture. The personalisation aesthetic is about generating the potential to adorn whilst also seeking to preserve the standard structures that make clear what those media are and ensuring that they don't let in too much of the chaos or messiness of unconstrained creative expression.
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