2023-2024
Research, User Interface
Karen Ingram
How can we help immigrant seniors to avoid misinformation they face from social media?
This is a thesis project for School of Visual Arts, Interaction Design MFA
Misinformation has always existed. However, during the COVID the issue got worse, as people were relying more on social media.
Especially, immigrant seniors are exposed to more misinformation for below reasons:
They are not familiar with technology
Non-English misinformation get less detected
Mainly use chat app that lack misinformation detection
I conducted interview with immigrant seniors:
“In kakaotalk, lots of information such as dealing with COVID came in”
“I compare it with other information. The background of the person talking about science and such.“
“When reading kakaotalk I care whether it's true or not”
”We relied a lot on the news”
Misook is from NYC who was previously office worker. She cares about her and her family's health.
Young-Ja was previously a pastor and now retired. She have argument with their son regarding vaccine.
Ok-Hee was previously a doctor and now retired.She have never questioned the medical information she has face.
Minji is a college student who frequently receives misinformation from her grandparents.
After conducting initial research and user interviews, I came up with three design principles:
Create a design that people with different opinions can all agree on.
Interactive design that leads people from rushed thinking and gives them a second to “confirm.”
Empower immigrant seniors with their current technology knowledge.
Co-creation session is where participant (target user) and researcher work together to figure out solution together. Before co-creation session, I imagined my project to be app-based. However, during the co-creation session I found out that app doesn't work.
By the suggestion of my co-creator, it started with a zine, which shows three messages: Wait, Check, and Ask. People need to go through each message to figure out what's fake and real information.
Wait until you calm down.
Check from multiple sources.
Ask people that you trust.
These three messages are distributed in the form that seniors are comfortable and interacting with,
which are: a zine, a video, and a card game.
The zine shows these three messages in detail, accompanied by detailed explanations and illustrations.
The video also shows the three detailed messages, with simple animations. It will be uploaded on YouTube which is a platform that immigrant seniors are comfortable with.
Card game incorporates these messages in the form of games and teaches people how to deal with fake news and how to combat it.
With these three design objects, immigrant seniors will be able to familiarize themselves with the messages and be cautious about the everyday information that they face.
The zine, video and card game overall received positive comments.
Some of the key points were:
