Take a look at some of my projects.
Helping Instagram understand why young users no longer post Stories.
Commissioned by Meta in 2024, I worked with a team of researchers at Stripe Partners to map the behaviours of teenagers within Instagram Stories sharing and consumption. As part of a broader project covering Brazil, France and Germany, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork among young people in Cologne.
Key findings highlighted German teenagers' concerns around privacy and the distribution of their images online, as well as worries around fitting into the dominant aesthetic culture of self-presentation Instagram was seen to represent. Snapchat was experienced as a more private, fun, and safe alternative for communicating with friends and sharing daily activities, as opposed to Instagram being a digital space geared only to showcasing highlights or curating a specific image for the eyes of loose acquaintances.
As part of an international team of researchers, working with music distribution service, TuneCore, and research agency, Word on the Curb, I conducted digital ethnography, online workshops and UX platform walkthroughs with German musicians to understand their concerns and desires regarding music distribution services.
Key findings showed that rather than a specific feature set, artists desired accessible, human customer service to guide them through their journey as musicians. Due to the precarious economic position of being an independent music artist, users of these distribution platforms primarily sought a service which felt like a partner in their creative journey - relational rather than transactional.
Exploring the relationship between artists and music distribution platforms.
Working with Google to capture Gen-Z and Millennials' AI experiences.
Commissioned by Google and Word on the Curb, the research uncovered a contradictory landscape where users showed concern around AI technologies and their impact on the future, but happily integrated these into their daily routines to make their life more comfortable.
The key findings highlighted that users relationships with AI centre around control - they wish to feel in control of AI to counter concerns of manipulation. Advertising algorithms were felt to be controlling and passively harvesting data, while apps such as Google Translate gave users a consistent feeling of agency in their interactions with AI. Organisations should build trust with their users as sensible marshals of this new technology. For Google, this led to recommendations of watermarking and labelling AI-generated content across platforms and focusing on functionality of products, emphasising their role as tools to make life and work more efficient and productive.
This long-term research project drew on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork with dating app users in Berlin to understand not only dating app user practices, but also how these relate to the platforms they use.
The research revealed that dating app users operate via "rituals of transition", as they seek to move away from a dating app to other non-dating social media or messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp, before arranging a date with a potential partner. WhatsApp is directly linked to a user’s personal contacts stored on their phone, which leads to a feeling of heightened intimacy. The people you communicate with via WhatsApp are not simply profiles you have come across by chance online – you can only send messages to those whose phone number you have saved on your phone.
Understanding how young people in Berlin organise meetings through dating apps
Helping the BFI national archive reach a younger audience.
The BFI national archive hosts Britain's national memory and films - it is one of the largest and most important collections of film and television in the world. However, due to its relative obscurity - it is only open to the public once a year - its work sometimes goes unnoticed.
Compiling a report incorporating interviews with young people at the national archive open day, and case studies focussing on the social media presence of large cultural institutions such as the Met, my research concluded that the best way to raise the profile of the archive among young people would be to create a virtual tour on TikTok. Interviewing staff at the archive and filming across the premises, I created a video formatted for social media, sharing the work of the archive with a new audience.
I was recruited by King's College London's department of engineering to find a way to demystify the complex and groundbreaking research that is conducted at the university. To reach a wider audience and effectively and engagingly communicate scientific ideas, I developed a documentary series on YouTube, giving a behind-the-scenes style overview of various research projects, featuring industry partners such as Quorn, Alp Technologies, and Ericsson.
While before, research was hard to locate across the university's cluttered website, the YouTube channel now offers key insights via the Inside King's Engineering playlist. This provides easily-digestible and shareable assets for KCL to share across social media and directly engage a non-specialist audience.