A creative epilogue, instead of a conclusion | Mobile Me & You

Wrapping up a journey of years, months, days, even hours, can be challenging. You are trying to concentrate everything that happened into a few paragraphs, a book, an essay, even 140 characters (280 considering Twitter’s last update).
Most of the times, even if it is not a failed attempted, it is an unsatisfying one. You are always trying to include more stories, more struggles, more quotes and you end up not including many others worth being told. Nevertheless, a summary of a journey is always a great idea since it works as a reflection on the experiences and knowledge this journey taught you. And since this journey taught you something, it is worth sharing.

This is exactly what we will attempt to do in this particular Medium Post.
During the University’s winter semester at Panteion University, we challenged ourselves by our coordinator, Betty Tsakarestou, to get to discover more about how, how much, why and where different people use their phones.

As a team, we tried to map the similarities, differences, and habits of Millennials, that also have a creative viewpoint of things. We attempted to show that the stereotypes people had about Mobile Usage and Social Media, were, in fact, something else. Someone would argue that Millennials spend a lot of time on their phone, someone else would argue that editing a picture on your mobile phone can take a while but at the same time, the outcome can be really unique and creative. Therefore Millennials have a really different approach in how they interact with their phones and their peers, while their responsibilities and work take up a lot of that interaction and time.

Conducting interviews has broadened our horizons and gave us insights on how creative youngsters interact and behave when it comes to their phones.

Instagram and Photo-editing apps have really stolen the show of sharing knowledge and expressing talent and young people tend to reveal themselves and their creative thing through these applications.

At a time when Instagram Founders resign to “explore creativity again”, Instagram users, new or older, milk every possible way of expressing their talent in a professional and artistic way. At the same time, aesthetics matter and making art is something that comes naturally.

While our generation is considered to be addicted and always attached to their phones, our interviews showed us that this is something way too generic to be taken seriously.

“When I’m out with friends I might upload a story or two but I don’t have my phone in hand”, argues Jo, a 22-year-old talented photographer from Athens, who doesn’t let phones get into the way of real communications, even if these are digital or face-to face.

Finding insights from our interviews demanding but we were really keen on portraying the situation as we embraced and experienced it. We drew insights from both our local and international interviews that made us rethink our way of processing information and analyzing daily habits.

“Are there any other devices you need except for your phone?”, argues Mickey, a brand manager and photographer from China that lives and works between Europe and Asia.
This statement, while at first can struck us as funny or extravagant, is many of the times indeed true.

We use our smartphones as personal assistants, we mark our calendar, take notes, snap photos, watch movies, update on news and live a life that absolutely depends on these small devices with big screens that fit (most of the times in our pockets) in our pockets.
This routine and these practices don’t really have to mean something negative. As people, we tend to draw conclusions easily on which behaviors are is healthy and which are not.
In this case, we believe that we have to take a step back and rethink all the ways that smartphones and smart technology work in our benefit rather than against it.

Through this process, we, as a team, came out stronger and more prepared to face a world that is really undecidable about tech-savvy youngsters and their mobile usage.

We hope that the creativity put into this journey will help others explore their talents and express their voices, while we wish that it will continue the discussion about sharing economies and proper use of mobile-first technologies, both in an academic and an everyday basis.

As a team and as individuals we will continue to experiment, try, examine, fail, achieve while gaining knowledge about our world evolving around us

At this point, we would like to thank our coordinator, Ms. Betty Tsakarestou for her continuous support and guidance through this course in the past few months. Collaborating on projects worth sharing is a privilege that students rarely come across.

Our team: Danai Lyratzi, Christos Daniilidis, Frossini Drakouli, Maria Kall