Social intersections. Social media spaces as sites for creative pedagogies

Social media is pervasive in the lives of both students studying and those working in the creative industries. The mass socialisation of digital and online communications has meant that content is authored, curated, critiqued and reconfigured by a mass of users. Through the collective efforts of the users – posting, liking, commenting and sharing – connection and collaboration takes place. This paper focuses on the hyper-layered nature of social media use by students studying on Design courses at a university in the UK. It explores data across public accessible social media sites – twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, and views them as sites of creative productions. Visual analysis of students’ social media Profiles is presented and compared with those from the creative industries to explore the social intersections of creative production spaces. Social media spaces are sites of creative production, where the two ecosocial systems of trainee and trained converge. The relationship between the trainee designers studying in a university and the trained designers in the external industry is changing. There is a context collapse between creative learning, production and working practices. I present these digital spaces that connect students and creative industries through their hyperlinked ecocsocial environments and explore what this could offer as a creative pedagogic approach.