Creative participation and mobile ecologies among resource-constrained aspirant designers in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

In what has been termed the rise of the 'visual web', young people around the world, with the help of new media technologies, are creating and sharing visual artifacts with others. Sharing such creations is a central activity on Facebook, and sites such as Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr support the prolific visual communication made possible by camera-phones, and smartphones in particular. Emerging media literacies revolve around the creation of original visual content. These literacies support informal interpersonal genres based around mobile communication but are also linked to a wide range of visual design disciplines involving digital media production (such as graphic design, web design, animation, and game design, to name a handful). Concurrently, popular visual design software packages such as Adobe Creative Suite are being redesigned to support a mobile and specifically tablet-based ecology, possibly indicating a shift in visual design that is made on, and for, smaller screens.