Connected Design Learning: Aspiring Designers, Pinterest, and Social Media Literacy

Interior design practitioners continue to adopt social media technologies as part of the early stages of the inspiration design process. This prominence of social media is also interwoven in the practices of design students. However, the way interior design students perceive and use social media such as Pinterest® as a part of their design process has been underexplored. Drawing on interviews with 25 interior design students in a Council for Interior Design Accredited program, the findings from this study illustrate how students are developing their own norms and guidelines for their search strategies, evaluation of sources, and navigation of attribution on Pinterest. An understanding of interior design students’ perceptions of Pinterest is situated through a connected design learning and information literacy approach, which places values on student-driven interests, media knowledge, and technologies as opportunities to amplify design learning experiences across digital–physical environments. Although Pinterest has social networking features, the interviews revealed that interior design students do not view Pinterest as a social media platform and instead think of Pinterest as a digital tool used alongside other design software. From a connected design learning approach, this finding suggests an opportunity for educators to guide students on how to leverage some of the social features to expand their own professional design networks. With an ever-changing media ecology that provides opportunities for sharing creative work and requires adeptness at managing visibility and flows of information, insights for building more intentional learning environments around how students use Pinterest in interior design are provided.