During the “Take a Walk Through the Platform” workshop, participants worked in groups to analyse apps, social media platforms, or websites, focusing on their sociomaterial dimensions: cultural perspectives, political visions, user personas, and affordances. The walkthrough slows down habitual navigation, making the familiar strange. Participants then created affective cartographies reassembling platforms, giving voice to silenced elements and recognizing the materiality of the digital. Together, these exercises embrace the affirmative dimension inherent in critical platform studies.
Duolingo Group focused on:
– the journey of the ‘ideal user’ (using the walking-through methodology).
– the emotional journey of the real user (what emotions arise when using the app, and how do these emotions evolve over time? )
– the company’s vision, as shown on the official website and in the company handbook.
– the marketing communication campaign on social networks about the death of the mascot Duo.
What emerged?
– The gamification structure of learning platoform as a result of the edutainment vision of the company (visible from the use of characters, the motivational tone and the cartoon graphics).
The DUO mascot, the figure representing Duolingo, establishes a toxic relationship with the user by forcing commitment and daily use through a sense of guilt and emotional blackmail (‘If you don’t practise, I’m going to die’).
– Mistakes don’t exist: you practise until you get your exercise right (win).
– The democratisation of language learning is based on the values of the company’s founders and is visible in the company’s transparency and informative behaviour on its website (you can access materials, studies, marketing, graphics, staff enquiries, etc.). They want to demonstrate that their methodology works based on studies that they have funded.
How do we decide how to present it?
It’s a graphics repreenting the Duolingo interface, which is structured around levels, rewards and points. You can play it like a board game with a dice, but you always progress. The dice always give a positive response. This means that you have to follow the path and keep going.
Instead of game levels, there are spheres representing the emotions users experience while playing: initial enthusiasm; satisfaction at progress; falling in love with the game; realising that something is amiss; and then stress, anxiety and pressure caused by Duo’s insistence on daily practice, which makes users feel trapped. This leads to desperation, anger and a desire to escape.
The possibility of escape is suggested by disconnectiing from the app, showing the user finally free and relaxed, and by the choice to learn a language by travelling abroad instead of practising through the app.
The group used a collage of ironic phrases, as well as pictures, paintings and drawings of emotions, to replicate the platform’s humorous and casual tone. There is also a three-dimensional dice for playing the graphic as board game and a plasticine sculpture of the disturbing Duo.