Hiatus “Going Offline Together”
Activating young people to spend less time online
Designed at IADT
Graduate Exhibition Project
Team
Solo
My Role
Research & Strategy
Concept Development
Copywriting
Campaign
Art Direction
Digital Design
Print Design
Motion
Timeline
Feb–May 2023
My graduate showcase project tackled the subject of social media habits in teenagers and young people. Teens are spending hours on social media everyday. Through an extensive and immersive research process, including surveys and interviews, I discovered that they want to spend less time online, but struggle to switch off because a) algorithms make endless scrolling very addictive, and b) as so much of their social lives happen online, there is a big a fear of missing out (FOMO) when offline. The challenge for the project was making offline time more appealing to young people.
The Opportunity
The main aims of the project were to bring awareness to young people’s scrolling habits, and to empower them to take action themselves to reduce their time online independently. This required a valuable and engaging intervention for young people which is fun, playful and does not demonize they’re current social media usage.
The Solution
The outputs of the project were an app and a campaign. The campaign, consisting of scrolling feed installations, posters and social media diversions, visualizes and contextualizes people’s scrolling habits, so they can physically see how much time they’ve spent online. The motif of a receipt forms the basis of the visual language as it is about proof of peoples’ interactions and time spent online. The hiatus app is a tool to help young people break their bad habits online through peer accountability. The app responds to young people’s scrolling habits: as a group, friends sync their screen time, and once a group screen time limit has been reached, the app triggers a hiatus for everyone. Everyone gets temporarily locked out of the same social media apps at the same time. This collective action ensures there’s less FOMO involved in going offline.