Social Media as Resource for Involving Young People in Museum Innovation: A Cultural Studies Approach to Co-Design

This paper takes root in how social media represents a new framework and form of communication and how designing for the meditated encounters with these media require interdisciplinary perspectives from both cultural studies and interaction design. The authors argue that involving young people with social media as a participatory tool requires that designers take into consideration how visual interpretation, social semiotic, semantic and spatial practices are inherent in everyday social media usage. The authors report from a design research project where the media sharing software Instagram was used to explore how everyday users in an urban environment would relate to cultural heritage data. The authors propose a cultural studies based focus on the semiotics of mediation as a potential design based research methods that fit with participatory practices with social media.