<aside> 👋 Welcome to the Social Networks of Tomorrow 2023 logbook.
Social Networks of Tomorrow was an innovation-through-design program presented by the Innovation Lab at La Plateforme in Marseille, France.
Here, you can follow along with the program activities and our participants’ progress.
This (long) page begins with the beginning of the program and continues chronologically—use the table of contents below to jump to a particular phase or activity!
</aside>
<aside> 📅 2023 program phases: #1 OBSERVATION [April 17-May 16] #2 IDEATION [May 17-June 29] #3 PROTOTYPING [June 30-July 26]
</aside>
<aside> 💡 The program is kindly supported by the Project Liberty Foundation. Project Liberty is developing the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) aimed at bringing data ownership and control over online social relationships back to the users.
</aside>
<aside> 📖 The purpose of this logbook is to document the iterative process of hosting the first international hybrid program at La Plateforme.
Throughout the course of the program, we dealt with a variety of challenges, ranging from how to mix physical and online presence, to interdisciplinary project teams being scattered across Europe, and last but not least, how to test a variety of experimental design-led methods to imagine alternative social networks inspired by small communities.
**What will you find here?
Potential future participants** can discover the different activities that take place during the Lab, get to know the scope and format of various workshops, and get an idea of the curricula as well as the types of participants we are looking for. ** **Educators ****will find descriptions of our teaching methods and their scopes, get a sense of the global framework of the program, and gain some insight into the ups and downs of a hybrid teaching approach—what works and what doesn’t—in the form of a summarized digest.
**Social network developers will find a fresh approach to imagining the social networking of the future. We are convinced that there are already enough social network prototypes and alternatives and accompanying Discord communities. The aim of this program is to return to the people and rediscover how we live, organise, and communicate IRL. We imagine and prototype to understand and experiment with new configurations and functionalities for potential social networks to come.
At the end of each important section, you will find Digests aimed at each of the aforementioned audiences, extracting key insights about program activities and scopes.
</aside>
We launched the Social Networks of Tomorrow program at the Innovation Lab at La Plateforme in Marseille, France, on April 17, 2023. The funded program brought together a cohort of 12 participants from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, with 9 different nationalities, based in 5 European countries. The curriculum is organised in a hybrid format that mixes a majority of online activities with physical meetings in Marseille once a month.
Today's social networks are undergoing a multitude of crises, which means there is both a need and momentum for change. Alternative conceptual and technological environments are taking shape thanks to commotion around Web3, the Distributed Web, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Over 4 months together, the participants **imagined and prototyped new forms of decentralized social networks aimed at local communities ****(which could be based anywhere, not just in Marseille).
<aside> 💡 TABLE OF CONTENTS
</aside>
This year’s multidisciplinary cohort (see course’s face book) **brought together social scientists, entrepreneurs, designers, and technologists, who then formed multidisciplinary teams. Each team logged their progress throughout, which you can read at the following links:
**Team #1** Easy Riders
Team #2 Team Spirit
Team #3 BJT
Team #4 Fourth Space
By the end of the program, each team presented a concept prototype for a small-scale, community-inspired social network:
Easyrider aims to improve everyday conditions for delivery drivers through the creation of themed audio channels and urban mapping of spaces for delivery communities to meet.
GizUp’ redefines online relationships by making you feel “at home” online, taking inspiration from cultural customs of the Afghan diaspora.
In|prayer focuses on sense of intimacy and care mediated by a minimalist set of tangible interactions via a dedicated device.
Handshake creates unexpected bridges between communities such as associations, not-for-profits, and cultural organisations, encouraging to exchange ressources other than money, establish ant track common goals.
Program Phases
The program is divided into three phases:
#1 **Observation** #2 Ideation #3 Development.
Specialisation Tracks
In parallel with the main program, participants choose one or more of three specialisation tracks: Observation, UX/UI Design, or Development, intended to provide students with skills and knowledge required to create a quality social network proof-of-concept (POC) prototype. Everyone participates in a recurring UX Research workshop aimed at tying the tracks together.
PHASE #1: ENCOUNTERING COMMUNITIES AND VISITING INFRASTRUCTURES
The first phase of the program is focused on team-building, identifying and observing communities, and getting familiar with various notions around Web3 and the decentralized web.
At the start of every Innovation Lab program, we run a skill exchange exercise, a Spreadsheet of Skills, in which participants introduce themselves, share their skills, and mark things they would like to learn from each other:
Marseille is a vibrant, diverse city where many different lived realities coexist. It’s France’s second largest city, and home to a variety of immigrant communities that settled there at different periods of France’s history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Marseille experienced significant immigration driven by economic factors and political upheavals, particularly of Italians, Armenians, and Corsicans. Following mid-20th century decolonization, it experienced a surge in immigration from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, Marseille has continued to be a destination for immigrants from various parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. These successive waves of immigration brought a blend of languages, cuisines, and traditions that have contributed to the city's social, economic, and cultural vitality. However, historically, the “Phocean city” has long been among Europe’s poorest, a reality that is being tentatively addressed through heavy investment into technology and connectivity. It’s currently the world’s seventh largest hub for submarine cables and internet infrastructure.
When thinking about the social networks of tomorrow, Marseille’s entanglements give us a unique lens for looking at interdependencies between humans, the communities they belong to, and the infrastructures that connect them.
On the first day of the program, we took the participants on a food tour to give them an idea of Marseille’s complexity. Guided by Alexis and Severine from Culinary Backstreets, we visited a variety of establishments ranging from an Armenian supermarket (the Armenian community is one of the oldest and most well integrated communities in Marseille) to the Noailles market, which sells Middle Eastern and North African imports and cuisine.
Visiting the many districts (”villages”) of Marseille by exploring their different “markets.”
