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This paper investigates how online platforms co-construct spatialities of fashion design. Advancing the notion of workspaces of mediation, the article interlinks research on the geographies of creative work with debates on digital geography. It demonstrates that humans, online platforms, and spatiality are interrelated and come together in the constitution of everyday spatial encounters and experiences. Applying methods from digital ethnography, in-depth interviews, on/offline participant observations, and an analysis of Instagram accounts were conducted. The article demonstrates that Instagram has become a powerful non-human actor that reconfigures (i) practices, (ii) spaces, and (iii) places of work. With the notion of workspaces of mediation, the paper argues that spaces of work must go beyond concepts of hybrid space and beyond the geotag. Instead, mediated workspaces are constituted as a complex entanglement of online and offline socio-spatial relations and practices.

Online platforms provide a technological infrastructure allowing social actors to enact and utilize networks with a global reach. They play important roles as intermediaries and algorithm-based curators of social interaction. This paper addresses two knowledge gaps: First, while a growing number of empirical studies has deepened our insights into the social dynamics characterizing single platforms, little is known about the multiple ways in which users or user groups combine diverse online offers according to their preferences. Second, the empirical focus has mainly been on online interaction. However, in everyday practices, the online is always situated in offline practices. It is thus necessary to understand the complex interdependencies of online and offline spheres. This paper therefore aims to develop an ecological heuristic that positions the user(s) and their practices center stage in the analysis and to elucidate the on/offline opportunity spaces and the affordances and constraints they provide for user agency.