Millennial Identity Encyclopedia

Web & App design, Branding design, Online Community

This is the “Thesis” project in my senior year. I had always been interested in researching people's behavior and psychology. I found an emerging vocabulary of labeling / categorization among the millennial generation, which was my entry point to start this project. I followed identity discovering directions and went through many experiment and design iterations. I chose a "web online community" as the final artistic expression.

CONCEPT OVERVIEW

Do you think you are one of them?

Shakespeare created the word “swagger” during The Elizabethan Age. The democratization of publishing allows all of us to be authors and share our thoughts with the world. In the digital age, we create acronyms, we reinvent old words with new meanings, and we use concepts of technology to describe ourselves in new ways: #foodie, #procrastinating, #instafamous.

Our generation started a linguistic journey into the unknown that is creative but might also challenge how we define ourselves.

The Millennial Identity Encyclopedia helps us sharing the language we use to describe ourselves as well as other members of our community. The interface is divided into two complementary divisions:
The black side: represents the individual space
The white side: stands for the community.

The platform allows to find personal identity, along with defining us as a generation with unique cultural content.

Highlighting the individual independence in the same time pointing the online social connection, for every user, the website generates a unique designed “hashtag” as a personal icon to represent each user.

The Millennial Identity Encyclopedia leads us collecting our core identities and connecting to people who share our values and ideas, within the vocabulary created by ourselves.

We use concepts of modern lifestyle and build those powerful words to describe ourselves. Those are the new identities created in our generation. But how can I define myself with those words in limited accessibility and understanding, and following that, find those kinds of people who share the same interests, ideas and values with me.

Then Millennial Identity Encyclopedia is a social media platform here for this demand.

DESIGN PROCESS

DISCOVERY & IDEATION

EXPERIMENT 1

Fun and Insightful Play-Cards for Exploring Human Identity & Self-Discovery with Your Friends

Human Identity Encyclopedia Board-game:
The concept behind my experiment 1 is rooted in the tendency of people always mentally categorize individuals into groups. Why can't we better identify a newly known person systematically. Based on this direction, I have created this board-game, which includes a kit of play-cards divided into three categories: "Human Sounds Abilities," "Human Idiosyncrasy Category," and "Human Animal Personalities." Each category contains 7 cards that correspond to different types.

I believe “language” is one of the best human classification system. So I used it as the concept of the cover design. Describe a little bit about yourself? One of the most common questions in our daily life. It is difficult for people to introduce oneself to another.
So this board game taxonomy encyclopedia is ready to objectively define a person's identity in fun ways, for yourself and whoever you want to know.

EXPERIMENT 2

A website designed for people to identify their categories & build communities with millennial words.

We always get along with people of the same type, and people in the same circle must have certain similarities. Not only did I want to give it a lexical reference, but I wanted to bring these people together. According to my feedback on Experiment 1, the human trait category for new words used in millennial languages received the most attention.

TEST & FEEDBACK

Next Step

Anthropologists and psychologists are working to precisely identify personalities based on certain tests; Social media and entertainment departments are working on building different types of communities that bring people together. This product is not the scientific data for self-knowledge and development, nor a regular discussions platform. It's the millennial way to use the latest wording to categorize people and find community. Based on my research and experimentation, I decided the final artistic deliverable would be an online community website, mobile app and complete brand system.