Written for those interested in the createwithpixels app's development history.

In submitting the Shushmoji app to the Google Play store, several changes were required to the app's promotional banners before Google Play approved the app. The changes that Create With Cape Town made may be of interest to other designers preparing edgy campaigns, given Google Play Store's somewhat opaque feedback- the store simply flags which designs are rejected, but does not specify exactly which elements must change. 

Below is a Slideshare presentation featuring the varying banner iterations - see if you can spot the differences? The answers follow below...

 

Adding an age-restriction to all banners (slides 8 to 14)
The first major change was adding a 13+ graphic in the bottom right of the presentation to comply with the policy that ‘app’s marketing imagery and text must make it clear that the app is only for young people aged 13 or older’. Subsequently, the Google Play Store calculated this rating for each country based on its app questionnaire. It decided on to a revised age restriction of 12+, so this banner is not inaccurate but will be updated with the next app version's submission.

Written for emoji sticker fans and recipients of harassment via WhatsApp.

Written for visual design educators and social semiotic researchers interested in students' use of data visualisations for argument.

Our new chapter is a sequel to 'Exploring academic argument in information graphics' (2020), in which we proposed the framework for argument in data visualizations shown in Table 1. This social semiotic framework provides a holistic view that is useful for providing feedback and recognising students’ work as realised through the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meta-functions. For example, in addition to the verbal (written) mode that they are usually assessed on in Higher Education, students' digital poster designs must also consider composition, size, shape and colour choices.

Table 1. Framework for analysing and producing argument in data visualisation.
Designed by Arlene Archer and Travis Noakes, 2021.

Here is a link to  Associate Professor Arlene Archer and my presentation on our manuscript,  'Developing critique and academic argument in ablended-learning datavisualization course'. It's on Slideshare at www.slideshare.net/TravisNoakes/developing-critique-and-academic-argument-in-a-blendedlearning-data-visualization-course. We developed this presentation for the Cape Peninsula University of Technology's (CPUT) Design Research Activities Workgroup (DRAW). 

Figure 1. Data Visualization in Society book cover, Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

1. Its e-book page is at https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048543137/data-visualization-in-society.

Written for researchers interested in using design strategy and brand positioning for improving their online research presences (particularly via blogs, blogsites and websites).
Last year, Jon Whelan and I updated this blogsite to prepare for my post-doctoral reality as a media studies research fellow, who can contribute to scholarly publications and pursue new research opportunities. By contrast to our previous work focused on Blogger customisation in 2016, the latest design process was largely a strategic one. It drew strongly on insights from brand positioning, plus design strategy more broadly, for my blogsite's improvements:

A. Why Strategic Design?
Table 1. High-, mid- and practice level design disciplines.

HL  Design Management (i.e. brand & software & service design mx)

HL  Strategic Design (i.e. data analysis informing brand positioning)

ML  Design Thinking (meta-disciplinary)

PL   Surface design

PL   Brand design management

PL   User-centred and experience design

PL   Software and information design

PL   Service design management

PL   Curricular and instructional design

PL   Legal design

PL   Business design management

As Table 1 illustrates, the disciplines of Strategic Design and Design Management are high level (HL) strategic ones. In business, these disciplines typically seek to define and improve the long-term, 'meta' design drivers. By contrast, Design Thinking is a mid-level (ML) meta-disciplinary approach that often seeks to tackle a ‘wicked problem’ space with varied perspectives in a short burst. At the bottom of the table are performance level (PL) practices whose designers' expertise is used for providing discrete, 'micro' solutions.

For an individual blog designer, strategic design considerations may be particularly helpful for answering a big personal challenge. For example, mine was 'How do I update my research blogsite to best support my post-PhD aspirations?' To answer this, I did a strategic design process that included data analysis, a review of my personal branding plus identity development exercises. These informed my creative brief to Jon, plus the ongoing development of this blogsite.

To improve my blog's usability and personal salience, I made the following design changes:
  +1> My roles were simplified;
  +2> I checked how each role and my research interests were reflected in my labels;
  +3> My publication plan addresses my diverse roles and interests;
  +4> I reordered my 'research' navigation to support the postdoctoral publication hierarchy;
  +5> I also took other measures for improved reliability;
  +6> plus security.

+1> Refined my personal brand positioning and roles
Online spaces can provide ready opportunities for individuals to experiment with digital personas. As part of my PhD's broader identity exploration project, my blog featured five roles in its navigation. These were 'researcher', 'designer', 'educator', 'public speaker' and 'volunteer'.

While accurate in terms of identity exploration as a PhD candidate, it made for a complex and potentially confusing navigation structure on the mobile phone (see left in Figure 1). It also seemed important to simplify identities to reduce that inevitable 'he's a jack-of-all-trades' perception!

Figure 1. travisnoakes.co.za navigations (version 2016 vs 2019) in mobile screen by Jon Wheelan, 2019.

To solve both challenges, I did an exercise for simplifying my identity by clearly defining the three roles I prefer to do. Such consolidation also supports a simpler overall online persona that is easier to keep coherent (i.e. I might describe the same roles on; LinkedIn for work, academic portals for research; Twitter micro-blogging or Facebook for friends). My roles were prioritised down to the big three of: 'researcher', 'design steward' and 'techné mentor'. Interestingly, researching design strategy introduced me to the unusual 'design steward' and 'techné mentor' roles: The former reflected how my career in design increasingly involved briefing designers and sharing their work, versus my own designs. As a ‘techné mentor’, I am involved in fluid, once-off educational interventions related to technology. My previous roles (such as speaker and volunteer) proved easy to re-house under the simpler navigation (see right in Figure 1).

+2> Checked that my Postdoctoral roles and interests are covered in Blogger labels
I've tried to make my blog easy to search by using Blogger 'labels' for each of its posts. By analysing my use of labels and how these relate to my roles, I learnt that there were far more articles that related to my role as a techné mentor, than as a researcher or design steward.

Written for readers interested in the directions that my future Post-doctoral research will take (and won't!)

Doing a PhD helps one understand that there are many gaps in human knowledge. It helps clarify the existence of important gaps and challenges one to do appropriate research that help with closing them. As part of writing Post-doctoral Fellowship applications, it became important to reflect on what my inter-disciplinary media studies research contributions have been so far and how I might build on them, and move onto new topics, in the future:

In working for UCT's 'ICT Access and Use' project (2011/12), I explored how media students followed a form of connected learning for developing identities linked to creative industry as undergrads. Together with Associate Professors Cheryl Brown and Laura Czerniewicz, we addressed a gap in the literature regarding university students’ extramural creative production with varied online services. Three case studies illustrated how Connected Learning can be empowering: each student provided a vivid example of digital practices embedded within social contexts, exemplifying the processes students undertake when constructing meaning and knowledge in the digital world. Such cases have been lacking in the literature, especially from developing country contexts (GAP1). Future research can build on ours by exploring how Connected Learning is experienced in other South  African contexts and more broadly in the global South.

My PhD thesis contributed to closing a research gap concerning digital inequality. Its research described how the e-portfolios of young Cape Town visual arts students at two secondary schools were shaped by their privileged or marginalised circumstances. There is an opportunity to extend this pathfinder project by looking at completely underserved schooling environments. For example, what digital repertoires are young visual creatives in Cape Town's marginalised settings (poor suburbs in schools without support for visual art or design) developing (GAP2)? This focus also suggests an opportunity to combine research interests in connected learning and participatory culture for exploring the visual creative productions that occur in underserved contexts outside formal academic settings in Cape Town and how these repertoires link to academic cultural capital, or not (GAP3). Multimodal researchers could also explore the longitudinal changes to visual creatives' e-portfolios (GAP4). For example, how students change their e-portfolio styles after leaving school and preparing to apprentice in creative industries or helping justify future study).

African design is an understudied and emergent field, which could benefit from more scholarship documenting its existing practices (Venter, 2018)}. After lengthy consideration, I have decided to develop an inter-disciplinary proposal for this field that addresses three distinct, but overlapping, concerns related to bitmap design, digital access and collaborative software design:

The first concern is what bitmap designs are marginalised young creatives producing and sharing online? This online content analysis will serve as a starting point for exploring the second concern- what does 'access' to digital design really mean in under-served contexts. For example: How accessible are apps and open source software to mobile-centric designers in highly constrained circumstances? What role does English as a 'global language' play in shaping Xhosa mother-tongue creatives' access and use to bitmap software? What cultural repertoires (i.e. fashion, gaming) seem to motivate interest in being a bitmap designer? The final concern is to contrast what happens when design thinking and design strategy approaches are used for collaborative software design focussed on localisation. I will describe the benefits and limitations of both, using workshops for aspirant, but under-resourced, visual creatives. They will be  consulted for understanding how Create With's new functional specifications for https://www.createwithpixels.com might provide better access for young South Africans.

By addressing these three concerns, my Post-doc research should make a solid contribution to the field of African design. It addition to its novel exploration of bitmap designers' content and circumstances, it should also generate interesting findings concerning the meanings of 'access', plus the differences between two design approaches' outcomes for collaborative software localisation.

Written for multimodal researchers interested in young peoples' self-presentation strategies and curation of digital personas.

I submitted 'Inequality in Digital Personas- e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media' in mid-February. Some of my thesis' findings and recommendations were removed to meet the 80,000 word restriction. This redacted writing may still have some value to researchers, so I'm sharing them as blog posts. Here's the first (all will be labelled 'PhD' for ease-of-finding):

Research background and three key contributions
Moving image media have become central to the learning and everyday life experiences of young children (Buckingham, 2003, 2013). However, such media are largely ignored in multimodal research, despite its acknowledgement of the importance of computer games, film and television (Kress, 2010). My research made a novel contribution by focusing on visual arts e-portfolio styles. This benefits research into the broad range of texts in the classroom that have resulted from the impact of digital media in the last decade (Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2013).

 My action research project (2009-13) enabled students at two sites, an independent and a government school, to be taught the creative appropriation of online portfolio software, Carbonmade, for curating their electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). The two very different sites were chosen for the following reasons: first, I wanted to explore a wide range of students' choices that economic, cultural and social differences might contribute to; secondly, the bandwidth costs of online publication are significant in under-resourced settings (Donner and Walton, 2013), and thirdly, there are massive differentials in South Africans' general levels of access to, and familiarity with, online media (Goldstuck, 2010, 2017).

Aside from assisting students with developing new media literacies as digital curators, my investigation also made valuable contributions through two other methodological innovations. Its longitudinal nature is unusual amongst multimodal studies in spanning three years (2010-12) at an independent school and two years (2012-2013) at a state one. Diachronic changes in students’ digital designs were examined through the novel methodological contribution of a screenshot analysis. My third contribution is an original description of how young people’s access to digital infrastructures influenced their development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation and the modal density of their e-portfolio styles.

Although multimodal content analysis proved highly useful, my thesis did not focus on contributing to social semiotics. Nevertheless, interesting findings emerged that contribute to multimodal theory: Researchers have described the dangers of stigma (Trottier, 2013) and oversharing (Agger, 2012) in peoples' digital self-presentations, but little has been written on the absence of social information as missing identifiers (Goffman, 1963) or concerning disidentifiers.

1. Understanding missing identifiers
Signs may be called symbols where signs are available to convey social information that is frequently and steadily available and routinely sought and received (Goffman, 1963). In e-portfolio curation, students might be unable to add information to particular identifying categories. This could result in their online identities missing identifying information that audiences would typically expect in a showcase digital portfolio.
There is a research gap concerning audience expectations of teenagers' online disciplinary identities. However, research into professional branding (van der Land & Mutinga, 2014. Van der Land, Willemsen & Unkel, 2015. van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016) is suggestive of how profile creators might increase their credibility by making particular choices in the information they provide. For example, human resource departments might expect to see prospective employees' self-portraits on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017) and users who post theirs are perceived to be more socially attractive and competent than ones who don't (Edwards, Stoll, Faculak & Carman, 2015). In such portraits, smiling and eye-contact (looking in the camera) appear to increase perceptions of credibility (van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016).

Digital self-presentation as an online exhibition 
Impression management is the term used to describe how a performer tweaks his or her performance to consciously give details or unintentionally give off details that leak off without any intention (Goffman, 1963). Notions of impression management have proved a useful theoretical foil for understanding online behavior (boyd, 2007. Marwick & boyd, 2011. Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010. Lewis, Kaufman & Christakis, 2008. Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008. Schroeder, 2002. Tufekci, 2008). Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor situates impression management within a specific bounded place, drawing on the concept of a behaviour setting (Barker, 1968) in which behaviour is driven by the norms and goals of specific settings. This delimited place is distilled into a dichotomy between front- and back regions, colloquially front stage and back stage. In the front stage, the actor tries to present an idealised version of the self that accords to a specific role. In my research, pupils were assessed on their front stage self-presentation as visual arts students. Students' curations of digitally disciplined personas drew on varied repertoires from a backstage, where the real work necessary to keep up appearances is done.

Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor is focused on synchronous performance in a situation where the performer is co-present with a live audience and can adjust his or her behaviours in response to their feedback. However, many social media sites provide communicative situations that are dissimilar to face-to-face ones. These situations do not depend on being bounded in space and time, nor supporting co-present, real-time observation between individuals (Miller, 1995). Consequently, it is more appropriate to use an exhibition metaphor than a stage play (Hogan, 2010), for social media artefacts. E-portfolios, for example, are presented asynchronously in space for many possible audiences:

Hogan defines an exhibition site as a site (typically online) where people submit reproduced artifacts (read: data). These artifacts are held in storehouses (databases). Curators (algorithms designed by the site's maintainers) selectively bring artifacts out of storage for particular audiences. Audience in these spaces includes those who have used the artefact or make use of it. There are two components of an exhibition space; in the first, information signifying an individual is delivered to the audience on demand by a third party. In the second, the reproducibility of the content and the database curator's role in distributing it means that the submitter does not continually monitor the data as the audience receives it. Nor may the contributor fully know his or her invisible audience(s).

The exhibition metaphor is highly appropriate for describing visual arts showcase e-portfolios, since these are exhibitions that are doubly curated; being self-curated by students, who organise digital content, that is redistributed via the virtual curatorship of an online portfolio service's database(s). The context of this exhibition space can stand in for the dramaturgical context of a specific setting (Schroeder, 2002). In contrast to the latter situation, the artist and his exhibit's viewers are not co-present in space in real-time, but may still monitor and react to each other. Furthermore, while the artist may order artefacts with a particular audience in mind, those who view and react to the content may be different from those for whom it was intended. This exhibition approach expands, but does not replace, the dramaturgical approach since each artist may adjust his or her self-presentation on an ongoing basis in response to audience feedback. An advantage of this expanded approach is that it can support a clearer articulation of the potential and perils of self-presentation in an age of digital reproduction (Hogan, 2010).

The expanded approach is also helpful for addressing the major difference between an embodied actor with a pre-existing physical presence, versus the disembodied e-portfolio exhibition space. Its creators must enter, select and upload information to create their digital presences. In e-portfolio production, students should have greater opportunity to exercise impression management and make strategic choices in what information they might provide through different modes. These modes provide different resources that students can use to control their information and affect not just what young people are able to reveal, but also what they are able to conceal (Jones, 2005).

Linking missing information to marginalised students' limited infrastructural access
Software both enables and constrains users' communications (van Leeuwen & Djonov, 2013) through posing particular kinds of representational and communicational choices.  The degree of design and customisation afforded by Carbonmade, as well as what software does not offer users (van Leeuwen, 2008), shaped students' e-portfolio styles. For example, free Carbonmade users had very limited options for customising portfolio layout. Unlike paid users they cannot upload a custom logo or feature big images.

In curating online personas, few keen students would set out to produce digitally disciplined identities that were incomplete showcases, since this might potentially compromise their credibility. Nevertheless, for first-timers, the task of e-portfolio design work can be overwhelming (Yancey, 2004) as it may involve many unfamiliar tasks. These can include: identity work; remediation of creative productions and their arrangement for diverse online audiences; and being ‘web sensible’ in exploiting the affordances of the digital space (such as hyperlinks). While the on-going maintenance of e-portfolios may involve seemingly simple processes, their quantum contributes to it being a complicated medium for novices to manage. They often needed to do several updates for achieving currency and coherence.

Such a requirement placed marginalised students at the greatest disadvantage in being under-resourced in not having home computer and internet access. They had to make choices during e-portfolio lessons, where they were hampered by their inexperience with computers and the internet. Highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited these teens' development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production. The concept of a digital hexis was proposed by Fanny Georges (2007) to designate a scheme of user self-representations. These self-representations are transformed like a body that is shaped by habit or by repetitive practice. Thus, the notion of hexis bears analogy with the shaping of meaning and body. The extent to which digital identities are produced is drawn from repetitive interactions and continuous perception of self-representations on the screen (Georges, 2009, p.1). Participants as e-portfolio curators, thus evidenced a digital hexis in their e-portfolio's self-description, imagery and level of organisation. These young people's accomplishments in evidencing digital hexeis via e-portfolio styles were thus closely linked to opportunities for regularly accessing and using digital information infrastructures.

In analysing all research participants' e-portfolio styles, different patterns between the two sites suggested that young people's material circumstances were reflected in the extent of their digital self-descriptions and portfolio organisation. In particular, inequalities in histories of digital infrastructure's access and use (for example "free" internet Wi-Fi) led to large differences in the levels of modal density (Norris, 2009) of e-portfolios at either site. Students’ multimodal texts can be dense in meaning, given that each mode adds its particular layer of complexity. According to a Multimodal (inter)action analysis approach (Norris, 2004, 2014), each students’ e-portfolio had a particular level of modal complexity. The more intricately intertwined a webpage’s multiple disembodied modes (such as image, text and layout), the higher the density. Differences in the densities of e-portfolios were linked to the digital hexis for e-portfolio curation that teens could exercise. Thus, class and digital divides were evident in the extent to which digital personas and imagery was curated.
Youth’s development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation benefitted from digital infrastructures available outside class: No independent school student lacked extra-mural internet access, but a few government school pupils did. Without such privilege, these students had to do e-portfolio work in class. Their inexperience with desktop computers and internet browser use often resulted in slower progress and needing to play ‘catch up’ in class with peers. Overall, students with the least internet access created e-portfolio styles that featured fewer roles and had a lower modal density than those of their peers. Such self-presentations and portfolios seemed to be hampered by absent information that reflected its curators not having the resources or time required for providing all the details that the e-portfolio curriculum requested. Consequently, marginalised students' e-portfolios seemed disorganised and less polished than affluent peers who benefitted from additional production periods outside class.