Aesthetics aren't decoration — they're decisions.
The Challenge
Designed to Desire is a white paper exploring how visual design and behavioral economics work together to shape the way teens shop online. It grew out of an open-ended graduate prompt that asked me to connect principles of visual storytelling and design to a topic I care about — in this case, social media’s influence on people my age.
With no required topic or structure, two challenges sat beneath that freedom. First, I have not taken many traditional design courses, so I needed to teach myself the working vocabulary of design — typography, color theory, layout hierarchy, emotional design — well enough to write about it credibly. Second, social media’s effect on teens is a crowded topic that often slips into alarmism or marketing fluff. I needed a thesis that connected behavioral economics, adolescent psychology, and visual design without sounding derivative.
The Solution
I narrowed the scope to one testable claim: design choices like color, typography, layout, and animation activate behavioral economic principles that shape teen shopping behavior online. That framing let me treat design as the delivery system for principles like social proof, anchoring, scarcity, and loss aversion.
I built a deliberately mixed source base — peer-reviewed studies for evidence, and trade voices for current practice — then organized the paper from foundation to application to ethics. I also treated the document’s own layout as part of the argument, using typography, neutral tones, and sourced imagery to demonstrate the principles the content describes.
The Outcome
The finished white paper synthesizes more than fifteen sources into a coherent argument about design’s role in teen consumer behavior. For me, the outcome was twofold.
Without a heavy design coursework background, I had to learn the underlying principles — typography psychology, color and emotion via Plutchik’s Wheel, interface patterns, the mechanics of visual hierarchy — well enough to teach them on the page. By the end, I could look at a product page or social feed and name the behavioral principles its design was activating.
Working across peer-reviewed studies, industry reports, and trade journalism taught me to triangulate sources, weigh evidence, and translate academic findings into accessible prose without flattening them.
Above all, this is a project I am proud of — one that connects a topic I care about to a discipline I am still growing into, and a reminder that an open-ended prompt is an opportunity when I treat it as one.