Streakle: A Discovery, Discussion and Networking Platform for Amateur Designers

Feedback is important for cultivating creativity. Constructive feedback on design is crucial for helping students and amateur designers iterate toward better solutions. However, most of the current platforms do not promote candid design feedback and are largely used for self-promotion.

The primary users of portfolio sites like Behance and Dribbble are design professionals and their key purpose is to connect with potential clients or firms for jobs. Feedback on portfolio sites are simplistic, and since they all are follower based communities, fewer followers means less feedback. It is hard to meet like-minded strangers through these platforms as there is no productive discussion and comments are typically reduced to mere back patting. Networking among students is generally limited to design festivals, competitions and conferences. The lack of an active network among students createspockets of brilliance where the shared intelligence of the students gets limited to their school campus and rarely goes beyond that. This in turn deters students from having considerable chances of interacting with students outside their own school community. Any kind of platform for design students to share hobby works and network with other like-minded students is absent.

This project proposes Streakle, a feedback and networking platform for design students to share and discuss works, get feedback, and network with others. Users interpret the designs based on the context stated by the designer and share feedback through comments and annotations. The group chat feature enables users to discuss works and other topics spontaneously. Users can choose to follow the topics of their interest and as it is not a follower based community, anybody who shares anything related to the user’s interest it appears in his timeline.