Developing Design Interventions for Cyberbullying: A Narrative-Based Participatory Approach

This paper presents a user-generated framework for designing affordances that would counter acts of cyberbullying on social media sites. To do so, we used narrative inquiry as a research methodology, which allowed our two focus groups – one composed of teens and the other of undergraduate students – to map out a cyberbullying story and overlay it with a set of design recommendations that, in their view, might alleviate mean and cruel behavior online. Four “cyberbullying stories” were constructed by the participants, each one revealing two sub-plots – the story that “is” (as perceived by these participants) and the story that “could be” (if certain design interventions were to be embedded in social media). In this paper, we describe seven emergent design themes evident in the participants’ design recommendations for social media: design for reflection, design for consequence, design for empathy, design for personal empowerment, design for fear, design for attention, and design for control and suppression.