How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
The theme I have chosen for the photo of this week is “bad design” and I chose the vacuum cleaner as the object. This type of vacuum cleaner is quite ineligible for the understanding of Norman towards the “good design”, he thinks “the good design objects can be used easily and efficiently with delight and fun” (Norman 1998, p. vii), because this type of vacuum cleaner including some vary shape components, users are not able to assemble them without reading the complex instruction. Moreover, this kind of vacuum cleaner does not clean the ceramic floor very well and is used laboriously. That’s why I categorized it into “bad design” section and chose it as this week’s object.
I used the built-in camera on Instagram to capture the photo. The square format of the Instagram constrained my recording, the vacuum cleaner is too tall and cannot be completed in the frame, so I had to away from the object as far as possible and tilted the phone to capture the photo which ensured the whole vacuum cleaner was in the frame. In addition, I paid more attention to the composition of the picture, although the vacuum cleaner totally lies in the diagonal line of the frame is the easiest way, I think it was not an interesting practice from creating the aesthetics visual effects perspectives. I therefore made it slightly leaned towards the diagonal line and two parts of the photo separated by the vacuum cleaner look same big. In order to supplement insufficient room lighting and present bright visual effect for the picture, I set up a bunch of white low-level light from a desk lamp which is in the direct front of the vacuum cleaner.
I have enjoyed playing around with the Instagram filters since I started to use Instagram and I think these Instagram filters all present very charming visual style. To edit the photo, I added the “Lark” filter onto the image before doing further adjustments. As my background wall is dark yellow and I was not willing to the yellow wall distract the audiences’ attention, I played around with the contrast and brightness to reduce the background color and make the image shown a clean and concise aesthetics. By doing so, I was able to make ‘the vacuum cleaner’ more eye-catching rather than other things, therefore it is more legible to anyone who views the post on Instagram or via other social platforms. I have always pursued the minimalism and clean photo design.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
To my surprise, I only captured one photo this time since the photo can satisfy my all requirements of composition, angles and lighting. In next, I uploaded it onto my Instagram account yumao0520 in the morning, but obviously, uploading it in the morning did not bring me much engagement. Same with previous photo and video work, I still used some hashtags while publishing and I also added two location hashtags #china and #shandong in order to have someone who followed or interested in these hashtags can view my post. In addition, I also continued to use the geo-tag in Chinese.
Compared with text captions on last week, I continued to use the same “3 section” form in this week, which is “one sentence to describe the bad design + my personal experience and understanding towards the object of this post + end question”, but I made some small changes as well. I think the previous text captions are quite long and people who viewed the post would not read these words and further not care the story behind the object. Therefore, I tried to limit the word count this week and made paragraphs them, which is benefit for the text caption structure looks clear and logically. The text caption is:
I emphasized the characteristics of the bad design is not easy to use, consumes more energy and wouldn’t have a great work result, in the text caption, in order to response to the good design topic from last week.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
Continuing the habit from last week that used a few and different types of hashtags to distribute the post, I still chose this approach this week and also arranged them by based on the category. The hashtags are related to design, brand, product, home, home appliance and location. The most important point for me to choose which hashtag I would use is carefully checking if these hashtags are active and how many posts they have. This kind of distribution approach of using different kinds of hashtags proved effectively, I got one “like” and one comment after 3 minutes publishing. Also, although I used the geo-tagging 曲阜孔廟 to further distribute, I think the distribution area of it is small. Hence, as I mentioned in the publishing part, I used the location hashtags, such as #china and #shandong to distribute as well. These hashtags distribution realm is broader, and posts are more active than the geo-tagging 曲阜孔廟, #china has 33.5 M posts and #shandong has 81 K posts, which could help to distribute to anyone who viewed these hashtags. Also, the #china can make a connection with the content “this type of vacuum cleaner is not suitable for the Chinese market” in the text caption and #shandong is the province I am currently living in, so it is reasonable to use them.
I also tried to tag the brand to distribute, the vacuum cleaner is actually the same brand with the humidifier in last week, but I decided to choose another official account of the band to tag which is @mediaglobal. The reason is that I did not get any feedback from the last week brand account (@mediaappliances) which means the distribution of tagging it might be some useless; on the other hand, the Instagram account @mideaglobal has much more followers than account @mediaappliances, which might have more help on distribution. My analysis proved correct, the result of tagging another brand account is exciting, the post got a like from @mediaglobal, although it was a little bit late, the “like” was received after a few days I uploaded the post, it was on Tuesday. Thus, I think it should be best to tag the brand account at weekdays, the person who takes charge of the official brand account might give you feedback when they viewed your post.
As for distribution on other social platforms, I continued to choose the Tumblr and Facebook platforms as my distribution options, but I met some problems. The Facebook account I particular set up for this course is not allowed me to publish or distribute the post for some reasons, no matter how many times I clicked the “connect to Facebook”, it always unconnected with the Facebook account, finally I have to use my personal Facebook account to distribute the post. The post is distributed very well through the Facebook and Tumblr, the hashtags and geo-tagging still work on these two social platforms that indicate the photo can be further distributed on the Facebook and Tumblr through hashtags and the geo-tags. We also can see from the screenshots, Tumblr provides the link to my Instagram account, so users on Tumblr can access directly to my Instagram post, but Facebook users can’t.
Reference List
Norman, D 1998, The design of everyday things, Basic Book, New York, pp. Vii-xv.