This week revealed the theme of the first rapid ideation session. It consisted of a surrealist Dixit card and a news article of our choice. The surrealist Dixit card is a little child-like person holding a sword in front of a giant blue dragon, appearing fire and smoke like background, which rendered a fighting scene from the first glance. And for the news article, I picked one about “How has social media affected mental health during the pandemic?” while researching the Socious app I am involved in mentioned last week.
I was unsure how these two artifacts would lead me to my next two weeks’ ideations and prototyping. But these were the material, for now, I was going to stick with.
My thought was to generate ideas to see how I could improve social media and apply it to Socious, to empower people to make positive changes in humankind and our Earth. To begin with, I tried to pick up some assumptions and their opposite thinking and generated some keywords, and I hoped those would be useful in the next two weeks. Otherwise, I might come back and adjust them.
A surrealist Dixit card:
| Assumptions (My first impression of reading this card) | Opposite thinking | Keywords |
| (Characters) A person fights against a giant blue dragon. | The giant blue dragon is a flying vessel for the warrior. | Warrior, Dragon |
| (Action) A person fights against a giant blue dragon. | The giant blue dragon is here to unite with the warrior. | Unite, Peace |
| (Object) The sword is to threaten the dragon. | The person holds up a sword as a symbolic gesture: “We can fight this together”. | Sword |
| (Object) The sword is to threaten the dragon. | The sword has the magic power to control the dragon. | Magic power |
| (Scenery) Home of the little child-like person, a burning village. | Home of the blue dragon is a cave with similar geology to the Grand Canyon area. | Home, Security |
The news article:
How has social media affected mental health during the pandemic? – Medical News Today, written by Kimberly Drake on Oct 6, 2021
| Assumptions | Opposite thinking | HMW…? |
| Social platforms become the primary way for people to gather information, share ideas, and reach out to others facing similar challenges. | People are addicted to social platforms and spend restless time on content purely for entertainment. | HMW: create a social platform that could gain awareness in issues that people can contribute and move forward? |
| People use social media to gather the latest health information effectively. | Some information on social media is misleading, false, and promotes unscientific actions. | HMW: create a community with accurate and fact-checked information? |
| Some negative posts and shared content contribute to the risk of depression in some people. | People use social media to get support from others and gather helpful information. | HMW: make sure information won’t become overwhelming and cause harm? |
| People express their positive and negative emotions to garner support from others. | People use social platforms to discuss and gather how to act on specific topics to make positive changes. | HMW: promote the use of the platform for people to participate in different topics safely? |
| Social platforms engage people by sharing, reacting, and commenting on different topics. | Social platforms provide actionable next steps by engaging people who care about the same topics. | HMW: extend the discussion to create campaigns with actionable next steps so that there will be positive changes in the topics people care about? |
The past two years have been tough for many people, including me. The pandemic, in a way, completely changes how we live, work, and hang on. It brought a lot of burden in a way that no one had foreseen. As a person who grew up in Hong Kong, the past two years have been particularly stressful. I would not get into details about the situation, but watching people fight for what they believed in restlessly had added additional thoughts on how I could help people make positive changes. I think that we can create a healthier social platform to promote positive changes and enrich people’s lives.