With the prevalence of social media in our everyday lives, it comes as no shock that editing photos, using beauty filters and tweaking unsightly blemishes has become the norm. However this is seen to have a negative effect on people's self esteem. The term „Snapchat Dysmorphia“ - a body image disorder characterized by the need to heavily edit one's own digital image - was coined by a plastic surgeon when he noticed that an increasing number of patients were bringing heavily-edited selfies to their consultation appointments. To combat this phenomenon, I proposed a speculative design intervention: „Growtesk“ - a social media app that is designed to analyze your face and based on algorithms, figure out what features the user is most insecure about and then exaggerate them.
Rough Draft
Creating The App
As soon as you sign up in the app, it accesses your camera and asks you to take a photo. The camera would send your face to Growtesk's algorithm and based on past internet searches (e.g. buying acne skincare, looking up plastic surgery, the celebrities whose photos you spend time looking at) it will edit your face to make the features you were trying to amend even more prominent.
In this way I hope to help people realize that the features, the small imperfections that they're born with are not that noticeable and in fact they make us more human.
This app will not have a curated feed meaning you cant add friends or followers. After you post your own photo the app will show you other people's photos based on whoever has posted most recently. In this way theres no pressure to look a certain way for people you know in real life.
Logo
I chose the name „Growtesk“ for a few reasons:
- The word grotesque means comically or repulsively ugly or distorted which is exactly what I was going for with the app.
- I decided to change the spelling of the word to incorporate the word „grow“ because I want people using this app to grow to love their features or at least not be as bothered by them.
- In design vernacular, the word „grotesk“ is written along with font names to indicate that said font is sans serif, meaning without decoration.
Therefore:
Main Poster
The main poster highlights how the camera distorts your face with accompanying text talking more about the app.
To finish off, there is no malicious intent behind this project. I am in no way trying to shame people for using filters or wanting to show a „prettier“ version of themselves. If I did so I would be a hypocrite as I myself like using filters. However, I feel in this day and age we need to be more mindful of what we are putting out into the world and what impact its having on ourselves and others. Its easy to get swept up into the fantasy that everything posted online is true which is why I wanted the project to be an extreme exaggeration in the opposite direction.
At the end of the day, we're not meant to look perfect all the time, we're meant to look human.
