From Instagrammable toilets to sky-high frames: How social media is shaping architecture

Key Points

Social media has enabled more exchange and communication about our cities and our everyday experiences.
Governments and companies use location data, hashtags and descriptions to determine what is attractive in a city.
A researcher says social media shows “slices of moments” and is not necessarily representative of experiences.

Social media has become woven into many people’s everyday lives, so much so that it is understood to be influencing the way our public spaces are designed and experienced.

Twenty years ago, having a MySpace page was a novelty but fast forward to today, taking a selfie and posting it on social media with a location isn’t unusual as holiday happy snaps are shared digitally and immediately online.

One such location is the Dubai Frame, a recent addition to the Emirati capital’s skyline constructed for its aesthetic purpose and social media appeal.

The 150m high photo frame in the sky is the result of an architectural competition designed to create an emblem of the “new face for Dubai”.

A large building with two narrow towers connected at the top, resembling a giant picture frame.

While it looks like a picture frame, this building in Dubai consists of two towers and a viewing platform. Source: Getty / Katiekk2

Its two parallel towers, linked by a museum building on the ground level and an observation deck at the top, form what appears from a distance to be a giant photo frame.

The concept behind it is that it serves as a window to both the city’s past and future, with older parts of the city visible in one direction and modern skyscrapers stretching south to the Persian Gulf in the other.

The building has over 341,000 followers on Instagram and thousands of tagged posts from visitors posing on the premises.

Tracy Huang, a lecturer in interior architecture at the University of NSW, said the ability of social media users “to capture and record their individual experiences and then share that globally with a vast amount of audiences” made them “participants in the design of our spaces”.

Data-driven planning

Huang said governments and organisations use data collected via social media statistics to inform the design and planning of areas.

“They are leveraging things like the GPS features, your ability to post certain types of content, your hashtags, your description, and they can use image content analysis, geo-location tag analysis to then determine what is attractive in a city,” she said.

Huang said those “who own consumption spaces like shopping malls and governments are cognisant of inviting people and tourism”.

“There are the sort of economic benefits of having people come to their country, as well as how the city branding and the image of the city is portrayed,” she said.

Shibuya, Tokyo’s busy commercial centre, is one of the areas of focus for Huang’s research.

A street crossing lined with buildings displaying advertisements on screens, with a crowd walking through the area.

Tokyo’s Shibuya commercial centre in Tokyo (pictured) and Sydney’s World Square are the subject of research into social media and the design of spaces. Source: Getty / Atlantide Phototravel

She said many of the main buildings in the area are owned by Tokyo Corporation.

“When you look through their strategic documents, social media becomes a very critical tool that they consider when they design these physical spaces,” Huang said.

“They talk about enabling the physical spaces to be captured and shared on the global platform to create this international branding image and drive people to the city centre.

“There is obviously a lot of financial and capital incentives behind how they want to create the spaces to be attractive.”

Influencing how we experience spaces and places

Not very long ago, many turned to guide books such as Lonely Planet to map out their travels. But these days, people rely on social media more often for travel inspiration and ideas.

Huang said this meant people are often guided by “what’s been curated for you already”.

In Bali, as more tourists wait in line to be photographed on rope swings set against picturesque backdrops, natural landscapes are being reshaped by development to cater to these visitors, leading some locals to express concerns.

Indonesia's Bali hosts many tourists every year

Pictures of people on the Bali swings abound on social media. Source: Anadolu / Anadolu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

For many social media-savvy travellers, a trip to the Indonesian island isn’t complete until a picture of them posing on the iconic swings makes it to the timeline.

Kelingking Beach, located on the island of Nusa Penida, is another one of Bali’s popular Instagram spots, frequently attracting large crowds of tourists seeking the ‘perfect’ picture.

Development near the beach is designed to help safely get visitors closer to the panoramic views they come to see.

But plans to install a 182m-tall glass lift on the cliff top, designed to transport tourists down to the sand, have received mixed reactions from locals.

Tourists walk down a steep set of stairs to on a cliff down to a picturesque beach.

Photographs of the picturesque landscapes of the Indonesian island of Bali are often posted to social media platforms such as Instagram. Source: Getty / Feature China/Future Publishing

While the lift could improve safety for those who would otherwise navigate the steep slope on foot to the beach and bring financial benefits, some are concerned it could harm the natural environment and attract even more tourists to an island that already hosts thousands of visitors each day.

An Instagrammable toilet

Huang said some locations take on what she describes as a sort of “digital ecology,” changing the general understanding or conventions of a place.

This could apply to spaces like toilets or bathrooms.

While bathrooms were once spaces where people would never have considered taking their cameras, the hashtag #bathroomselfie on Instagram has now been attached to more than 1.7 million images.

London restaurant Sketch has taken the trend to the next level, installing white egg-shaped pods with toilets inside.

Huang said social media is changing the way we classify spaces and the activities that happen within them.

White egg-shaped pod toilets in a restroom inside a building with a glass panel ceiling.

At Sketch in London, restaurant-goers often make a bee-line for the washroom. Source: Getty / View Pictures/Universal Images Group

“So something like a toilet that is generally very private, right, but through this [egg pod] design, it is something that’s super attractive that people want to take photos of.”

The toilets have also been used as an exhibition space, with different installations by artists.

“It’s taken on this sort of digital ecology, and how people are exchanging information online has then also influenced what the space does.”

Huang says: “The platform of Instagram has enabled more of that sort of exchange and communication about our cities and our everyday experiences.

“Before social media, that isn’t sort of part of the narrative, it was about the food or the experience, the community that you immerse yourself in.”

Huang said one of the theories she was working on was whether “this sort of veil of social media makes people ‘frame a city in a different way'”.

But she said this sparked questions about: “If you travel, what are you there for? Are we there for really taking that Instagram selfie, or are you there really to immerse in a culture … and the local, social and cultural elements of a place?”

“Are you there to just replicate what other people have done, so, sort of like you’re following someone else’s curation of the city for you, rather than actually going there and being immersed in it?”

She said there was a concern cities were becoming “homogenous”, where some places were becoming “like a theme park city that’s just been designed for experience”.

Influencing how spaces are created

Huang said many governments and businesses used data from Instagram to analyse how people were using and experiencing places.

“They use it to determine the flow of people and what is then the economic vitality of our cities and how users perceive a city,” she said.

Huang warned of “the danger” in relying too heavily on social media data when designing public spaces, questioning whether people can truly form an accurate picture of a place from social media posts.

“My fear of that is, it’s very techno-centric and data-driven,” she said.

“Can we assign some value to that and say that this is and isn’t what’s attractive and what our cities should be like?

“I don’t believe that is the right approach because people’s relationship with social media, why they post, how they post, and then how they represent cities in the digital sphere doesn’t necessarily represent how good cities should be designed; also it doesn’t represent all the different voices and the narratives within a city.”

Local experience of places

As part of Huang’s research, she will be speaking with locals about how they experience spaces in Tokyo’s Shibuya District, as well as in World Square, a shopping centre and urban development in Sydney.

She will oversee a group of students at the two locations who will map their “everyday experiences on the ground versus what the digital representations are”.

An open space in between shops with public art in the shape of a swirl.

Public spaces like World Square in Sydney are being researched to assess how real-world experiences of spaces compare to those derived from data collected through social media posts. Source: Getty / Nina Dermawan/Moment Editorial

Huang said she hoped this could “uncover the actual narratives in the city and how we experience it, versus how it’s been branded and represented in the digital sphere, where different voices have different power controls, and, the algorithm sort of lends itself to a different logic of attention”.

She said World Square’s social media presence showed there had been an obvious increase in “seasonal events, pop-ups and creating a more dynamic space that changes over time”. That, Huang said, would cater to the “attention economy”.

However, Huang said social media posts were “sort of slices of moments in time” and not necessarily representative of most people’s real experiences of spaces.

“When we actually do our ethnographic studies and immerse ourselves into the space, that’s not necessarily the experience of the space on an everyday basis,” Huang said.

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