Social Media Design Power!

My PhD project explores the power of design in the context of social media.

The very short version is: I explore marginalised experiences with social media from a disabled and queer standpoint (in the sense of Standpoint Theory) to uncover meaningful design alternatives that could support marginalised thriving. Specifically, I focus on how design power manifests in popular platforms in terms of how their design characteristics perpetuate unjust socio-technical structures and impact neurodivergent and transgender people.

I will upload the thesis once it’s done, but for now, here’s a list of publications and other content so far:

Publications

Social Media as Marginalisation Machine: The Trans Desire for Solidarity Spaces – K.Kender, K. Spiel. CHI’25.

Banal Autistic Social Media: A Found Footage Autoethnography – K. Kender, K. Spiel. ASSETS 2023.

The Shape of Social Media: Towards Addressing (Aesthetic) Design Power – K. Kender, C. Frauenberger. DIS 2022.

Tumblr is Queer and Twitter is Toxic: Speculating about the Vibe of Social Media Spaces – K. Kender. NordiCHI’22.

Posters

Here are some Posters from this Project, presented at different Venues and in different stages of work in progress.

Videos

A short disclaimer: I usually make my conference videos more of an introduction to the paper rather than a summary of the entire thing, so don’t rely on the video to know what’s in the paper. I am v annoyed at academic formats generally.