Depolarising X

FINAL RESULT HERE

Power, Design, and Influence

In the last years, social media platforms have become key players in shaping political discourse, often amplifying polarization. Under Elon Musk’s leadership, X (formerly Twitter) has embraced a deregulated 
approach, fueling debates around free speech and the role of platform design in public opinion. With other tech leaders following suit, interface design decisions are now more influential than ever, subtly guiding user behavior and engagement.

As political polarization intensifies, especially in a crucial election year, the design of digital spaces plays a critical role in shaping how information spreads. The way users interact with content, from algorithmic
recommendations to engagement-driven mechanics, impacts not only public discourse but also the stability of democratic systems. This raises urgent questions about whether designers should take responsibility for mitigating these effects, and if so, how interface design can be
reimagined to foster a healthier, less polarized online environment.

To provide a clear overview of our process,
we’ve created a graph outlining each step.

At the beginning of our research process, we conducted a thorough 
examination of X’s interface using a GUI-ripping approach. This method involved systematically deconstructing the platform’s graphical user
interface to analyze its structure, interaction patterns, and underlying
design choices. At first glance, this analysis felt overly detailed and even somewhat unnecessary. However, it ultimately laid the groundwork for our deeper research and speculative design interventions, allowing us to critically engage with X’s interface and its impact on user behavior.

After this analysis, we created a full systems map on FigJam, which
visualizes the problem spaces within X’s interface and their connection
to political polarization.

While researching and understanding the mechanics of the app, we
categorized the features and functionalities that drive engagement and polarization. Many features contribute to more than one problem space. We identified four key problem areas: Engagement-centric Design,
Content Structure, Trust & Truth, and Hate Speech.

As the chart above suggests, we can classify engagement related
features on X in the four categories Post Interactions, Notifications, Time Spent, and Following & For you, while each of the features in those
categories is interconnected with other problem spheres.

Visualisation

A turning point in our process was a workshop in class about speculative design held by Jordi. 

In the workshop we learned about speculative design, it's impact and some references to interesting works in different mediums.

We also practiced a work process of speculative design where we opened up our minds and brain stormed as many extreme ideas as we could, not in order to find a solution, but to find creative, original and exaggerated ways to saturate problems, instead of offering solutions. 

We drained a lot of inspiration from the work shop and used the same process in our work process too.

Work process

- Defining the features in X that might cause Political polarisation 

- Collecting them under Problem spaces 

- Brainstorming exaggerated and creative solutions for the problems 

- Sketching the solutions visually into „functioning“ UI elements 

- Designing and prototyping the best ones 

- Visualising them alongside our research in an interactive essay website

Idea brainstorming:

Sketching:

We tried to keep the sketching part open and fun, each time we defined a problem, set a short time and sketched as many ideas for each problem space.

Voting and picking the best ideas

We brainstormed and managed our ideas on the X system map. 

This way helped us keep and overview over al the features, problems and their interconnections with each others.

Prototyping

We copied X's design system to create spoof features that will mix smoothly in the app, some features we added are small and seamless others crazier and more dominant, but still all had the same porpoise - to exaggerate the existing polarising design.

The Final form:

In order to present it all nicely and clear we summarised our research and picked out our favourite screens we created and structured them in a form of an interactive essay.

The website:

When scrolling, on the left the user can read about the research results, all the polarising features we found on X' and sources to papers and researches that break apart the features and expose the human behaviour factors that make those features so effective. 

Under that is our speculation - we used the same methods but in an exaggerated way in order to create the opposite effect and expose them. 

On the right you see our redesigns, some are interactive and the reader can try it out for themselves, others are demonstration videos of the features.

Each screen highlights a specific feature we examined, aiming to shed new light on design elements that are typically integrated seamlessly into our daily social media experience.

TRY IT OUT YOURSELF

Conclusions

This project came together at a time when the issues we were exploring, felt more relevant than ever. While we were working, so much was
happening in the world that kept proving just how important it is to question engagement-driven design.
Moving from research to speculative design was both exciting and
challenging. Crafting satirical design interventions that hit the right
balance, critical yet cohesive, proved trickier than expected. It pushed us
to think more deliberately about how to communicate complex issues through design. In the end, our different strengths came together in a way that pushed the project in good directions. The website brings all of this together: our research, our experiments, and our take on how things could be done differently.