Lucy Kim 6.1040 Portfolio

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A1. TikTok and Instagram Weren't Built For Dancers ​

Planning: ​

The hunch: Dance is an art form and social activity but its representation on social media leans heavily into its adjacency to stardom and goal of performing for a large audience. I would like to create a social media app for dancers who are not looking for internet fame and virality, but for community, progress, and sharing love of the art form.

Who do I interview? ​

As a dancer myself, I see dance content proliferate my Instagram, Tiktok, and Youtube feed. From my experience on these apps, I can point out three types of accounts (use cases) and their motivations for posting:

  1. dancers who post publicly their best work for career growth,
  2. dancers who post privately/publicly their class videos to track their progress,
  3. dancers/studios who post publicly announcements about events, as leaders in a local/global community

Because my target audience are the latter two use cases, I thought of two dancers whose Instagram accounts have inspired me, personally, from within those use cases.

Jeremy, 24 year-old male, who started dance in college, represented MIT in a collegiate competitive dance team as an undergrad, competed in the local circuit on a selective Boston hip-hop crew as a grad student, and now works full-time in LA as an engineer while learning dance as a hobby.

Zach, 27 year-old male, a full-time engineer and dancer who specializes in hip-hop and house. He started breakdancing in Boston at age 13, and is now recognized as a leader in the Boston dance community. He is the co-founder of Tiny Village, a non-profit initiative to share hip hop dance fundamentals and provide a space for beginners or introverted free-style dancers.

I reached out to both Jeremy and Zach, because while they both use social media very intentionally as a tool to improve dance and stay connected, they happen to be in different stages of their dance journeys: the first, growing in and learning from the community, and the latter, already established as a dancer and interested in building the community stronger. I hoped I could take what they thought about the most popular social media for dancers, Instagram, and build a tool that would help dancers enjoy dance more.

What questions do I ask them? ​

My questions were split into two sections: about their dance journey, and about their use of social media.

Personal Dance Journey ​

  1. How did you start dancing?
  2. What inspires you to dance?
  3. Where are you in your dance journey/how do you continue to improve?
  4. Who makes up your dance community?
  5. What is the next goal you want to achieve in your dance journey?
  6. Do you like watching back videos of yourself dancing?

Dance and Social Media ​

  1. Is social media necessary to stay connected to your dance community?
  2. What kind of content do you consume related to dance on Instagram?
  3. Who do you follow on your dance account?
  4. Have you ever wanted to be "discovered" on Instagram?
  5. What kind of content do you save on Instagram?
  6. How do you draw the line between inspiration from content you see online vs. maintaining a unique dance style and mode of self expression?
  7. Has social media ever affected your relationship with dance negatively?

Interview Reports: ​

JEREMY; ZOOM @ BOSTON <> LA; SUN 9/10/23. ​

Jeremy asked for an early morning meeting time. Later that night he was going to the open-call auditions for GRV, a well-known LA hip-hop training team. He describes LA dancers as very "grindy" and on another level in terms of difficulty.

Jeremy has been posting for a year on a public Instagram account (following ~100 dancers and choreographers in his direct circles, with a similary number of followers), where he posts videos of him learning at workshops (i.e. classes) every week, in order to track his own growth. "It doesn't matter how ass I was, I sometimes will not watch and just post." He looks back on good videos when he's feeling "ass" at dance, and bad videos when his ego is bloated. He looks at captions to reflect on what his old self thought about his performance, and is able to see even from within a year ago how much his thinking has changed as well as how much "less-cringe" his dance is now.

Interesting Takeaway: A progress account is purely for himself and is symbolic of how he owns his dance journey and is (recently) secure in his abilities.

Although his account is public, he doesn't care about who sees his content, especially because he doesn't ever see himself becoming a professional dancer. Additionally, the account is small and tight-knit with his direct circles: "I don't follow a lot of people I don't know. That crowds the feed with irrelevant shit, but there's this one breaker from Japan whose dance is just eye-candy." He sees the progress of those around him and feels inspired.

ZACH; ZINNEKINS @ HARVARD SQUARE; MON 9/11/23. ​

Zach walked into the Kung Fu Tea at Harvard looking concerned. A recent Instagram post by another well-recognized dancer in Boston has been on his mind.

Zach has a personal public account where he posts his art and dance content, as well as an organizational account that he shares with his cofounder Jess. He is an educator and a well-connected node within the Boston dance community, and reaches many students and peers for his organization through Instagram stories, reels, and posts. He is one of the dancers I, and Jeremy, look up to, so when I ask him if he ever considered trying to go viral with his dance content, he answered: "I fight the urge every day." He fights the urge because he is someone who takes the art foundation of dance very seriously: "I go into a flow state while dancing." He supports aspiring professionals around him online by liking and sharing their content, but personally focuses on self-expression and sharing more than what he takes from the community.

Interesting were the ways he used Instagram for both his personal and organizational account, as he showed me his feed and explore page.

Interesting Takeaway: Some creatives want a lot of control over the content they consume, and thus have an animosity towards recommendation algorithms.

Because Zach cares so much about unique self-expression in dance as a creative art form, he is extremely careful about the dance content he allows himself to see. Zach uses Instagram unfollow and block features, avoids clicking on dance content in his explore page, and never watches the same video twice, in order to prevent himself from replicating trendy content.

Design Opportunities: ​

  1. Progress Tracking and Reporting:

Users should be able to post videos of their dance and enter fields of related data, which can be later presented back to the user as a cumulative report of their dance progress for a certain time period. This data can include song title, choreographer credits, dance studio, the genre of dance, the technique they were focusing on, the technique they thought they did well vs. the technique they thought they didn't do well. Like the Spotify Wrapped feature, users can look back every year on their progress and get a playlist of songs they know how to dance to.

Both Jeremy and Zach named filming and watching videos of themselves dancing in solitary practice as the most effective practice method. Zach names the four years starting mid college, when he was filming and watching himself in five minute sprints for 4-8 hours a day, as the period of greatest growth.

  1. Organizer Account:

There should be two account types: personal dance accounts and community organizer accounts. The highlighted, easily accessible, ephemeral content of this app (e.g. Instagram stories, which disappear after 24 hours) should be announcements from community organizers to bump event/class schedules. These accounts should also have functionality that is live-reporting schedule changes to their classes. They should also uniquely be able to post conversation starters (maybe represented as a photo on the feed).

Jeremy shared his frustration of dance studios on Hong Kong using Instagram stories to post their class schedules the morning of, only to cancel classes five minutes before because not enough students responded to the story to show interest. With the design catered for the organizer account, it should encourage a higher standard and ease for dance studios to engage with dancers, their schedules, and demonstrated interest. Additionally, Zach spoke of his difficulty engaging with social media as an increasingly "public-facing" figure, where the ripples of his words carried more weight than before in a small volatile community that is hip hop in Boston. A clear distinction in the features offered to his personal dance content and his organization's front-face may help in keeping the spheres distinct for himself.

  1. Protect Self Expression vs. Explore:

The app should have a recommendation algorithm that uses the type of content the user posts on their own account to show dancers and posts around them that they might like. However, this algorithm should be software-malleable, as in users should be able to alter its functionality in order to have higher control over how often and from what data the algorithm draws its recommendations.

The growth of the dancefluencer (dance influencer) indicates that Instagram's algorithm can push dance content into the mainstream. However, Zach, Jeremy, and I all share a pickiness for what dancers we follow, which indicates a shared value for niche, or in Jeremy's case localized, explorations. Allowing for finer-tuned settings on the recommendation algorithm, kind of like a dating app, complete with deal-breakers, might be an interesting avenue to explore.