O processo de criação de fanfics: um estudo sobre o uso de ferramentas de design em comunidades virtuais de fãs

Abstract

Virtual communities are presented as a web of relationships among people who share similar tastes, values, interests, and intentions. Their members constantly consult, exchange, modify, and complement information with one another, effectively contributing to the construction of the group’s collective intelligence. The fan community, known as fandom, was initially seen as a passive audience that merely consumed culture. However, over the years, this audience has become increasingly productive, engaging actively with what it consumes by creating, expanding, and developing personalized versions of certain cultural products, known as fanmades. This study aims to investigate whether – and which – design tools are implicitly present in the creation of fanfics, a type of fanmade, within virtual fan communities. The research is based on the perspective proposed by Manzini (2017), who emphasizes the cultural role of design as a producer of meaning. To this end, interviews were conducted with fanfic writers to understand their creative writing processes. The responses were analyzed considering design tools described by Carvalho (2022) in their undergraduate thesis. The analysis revealed that 10 out of the 28 tools considered showed some level of correlation with the participants’ accounts. It is important to note that none of these tools were explicitly mentioned by the writers, suggesting that their use occurred intuitively or unconsciously. Overall, the results indicate that, even though the participants did not explicitly refer to the tools, design goes beyond being a set of tools to solve problems and it is present in the fanfic creation process, even if subtly.