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Final Note

All of us need to think about the text we experience by interacting with others, for we know what we think only when we try to articulate or represent our thought (Booth, 2008)

We believe that in this multi-media, information oriented world it is increasingly important to create opportunities for people to think critically and creatively about current events. With projects such as TruthGoggles and the initiatives of the Knight Foundation we see people and news organizations working together to solve the credibility “problem” that has emerged in the age of the citizen journalist.    

The facts are important. But also important is the voice of the people in this participatory age. We are inspired by projects such as Emoto that seek to give form to the emotions people feel around particular events and cultural moments. We recognize that new forms of commentary on current affairs such as viral memes act as the “Flash bulb memories” of our age. We also agree with David Gauntlett that everyday people are creative and that for them “making is connecting.”

So we ask, what would it mean to the news and readers of the news, if the voice of people could be read and shared alongside the context from which they emerged? How can engaging with current affairs become a richer experience when news consumers interact with meme consumers? What are the possibilities when the information that fuels ideas shares the same space as the tools for voicing feelings about those ideas and those consumers transform into makers?

Our proposal aims at creating a bridge between and among context driven readers (the news consumers) and entertainment driven readers (meme consumers) despite geographic or philosophical divides. By capturing not only the spectrum of facts but also the spectrum of feelings surrounding the news, we can enrich our understanding of what we know and what we believe about our world.

References

Booth, David W. (David Wallace). It’s Critical! : Classroom Strategies for Promoting Critical and Creative Comprehension. Markham, Ont.: Pembroke Publishers, 2008. 

http://www.emoto2012.org/

http://www.knightfoundation.org/what-we-fund/innovating-media

Shihab, Ibrahim Abu. “Reading as Critical Thinking.” Asian Social Science 7.8 (2011): 209–219.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/18/flashbulb-memery/)

http://truthgoggl.es/

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Reflection on Step 4: Interrogating our Storyboard Scenarios

Our work this morning was to revisit the storyboards we developed and reflect on the activities, environments, interactions, objects and users they propose. We asked ourselves whether the scenarios met our goal of connecting and empowering two different groups who care about current events: the consumers of news via traditional journalistic platforms and the consumers of memes via social media. We re-examined our assumptions about their motivations for participation and typical activities. We imagined extreme users of each media (the person who reads the news in the print newspaper and the person who explicitly searches for and consumes memes) and the affordances of those technologies. We determined the opportunity for empowerment of each group is to think our design moving them from “Ready to know” about current affairs to “Ready to hold an opinion.”

            Our conclusion post interrogation is that each group stands to benefit from the other’s way of processing current events. Each user is interested in what is happening now and invested in their contemporary world, yet they are only getting a part of the whole picture. Meme consumers are encountering the varied and lively commentary on current events by “the crowd” but are sometimes missing the larger context of “the facts,” “history” and “what the experts think.” Traditional news consumers are getting a more measured, fact-checked and carefully crafted version of current events, but missing the powerful collective voice of everyday people and how they feel about the news.

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The mobile interface

Why did we choose to work with a touch-based mobile interface, and what are the strengths and weaknesses about this type of interface? We chose to work with this kind of interface because nearly everyone owns a cell phone (or other kinds of mobile-based artefacts) in this day and age. A large percentage of these mobile devices have an interaction-form which is based on touch-screens and they have a lot of different applications for both fun and seriousness. The main point is that most people have some sort of mobile interface integrated in their daily life. The mobile interface are designed for devices that are hand-held and intended to be used while on the move. And the technology that support mobile interfaces have become ubiquitous in the last decade (Sharp, et.al, 2011, p. 266). These mobile technologies has opended up towards becomming closer to people who is not in physical reach. The way we communicate with each other has also changed through mobile interfaces. We have tha ability to take our communicative tools with us on the go. And this aspect is a key point in our concept. The way we communicate with each other on the go. Even if we are communicating with people whom we do not know, and doing this anonymously The disadvantages about using the mobile interface are, that if the interaction is too complicated people tend to give up or get bored easily. Therfore we have a wish to make our application as simple to use as possible. Another weakness or difficulty is designing for the small screen and the limited control space available. - "Designers have to think carefully about what type of controls to use, where to put them on the device, and how to map them into the software" (Ibid., p. 269) We have tried to simplify the interface and making the interaction/navigation as natural as possible. Hence making the text-based parts a minimum. The interface has to speak for itself. Litterature — Rogers, Sharp & Preece (2011): “Interaction Design – Beyond Human-Computer Interaction” (2nd. edition)

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Reflection on step 1: Brainstorming

Before we began our brainstorming session, we discussed our concern regarding the time limitations on the challenge. As a team located in North America, we also knew we had to utilize the time we had at the front end of the process wisely, because we as we were going to sleep, other teams would be starting their day and the final push towards realizing their ideas.

            This time crunch shaped how we approached our brainstorming. We narrowed the scope of our ideation to our team members’ emerging areas of expertise and interest: crowdsourcing and the intelligence of groups within the culture of sharing; improving critical and creative thinking in reading and viewing activities; developing remote conversation tools; adding “feeling data” to online experiences; utilizing Activity Theory framework and context-based design; and employing design research methods at the front end of the design process.

            Armed with this focus, what emerged from our brainstorming session was our intent to connect and empower two distinct groups within American culture that care about current affairs: the consumers (and makers) of internet-based memes and the consumers (and makers) of the news.

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Good Morning from North America!

We have a busy few hours ahead of us here at NC State. We were excited to wake up and see everyone else's progress, and how each team's ideas are coming together.

In the coming hour we will be posting reflections on the steps we have taken so far, as we continue to move forward with the scenarios we have developed.

Our next steps:

Revisit and interrogate our scenarios

Come up with a name for our concept

Ground our concept in the Literature and write about it

Develop Wireframes

Demonstrate the concept

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The communicative talk.

Goodmorning. (Warning: Typos) Lets start where we left of last night. We talked a lot about which kind of people we would like our concept to reach. Of couse we would like to reach everybody, but that is just not realistic thinking. Therefore we went on with a discussion about the differencies in different kind of cultural groups. First we talked about the differencies of communication amongst agegroups. We would like to open up a dialogue between the agegroups so that the distance between them won't be that huge. By that lessening the misunderstandings between the agegroups, opening the confrontations. Let the different generations reach each other on a common ground which opens up an understanding about the different thought and social norms in between the groups. Next we talked about tabu. About how sex and sexuality has become topics which has a kind of secretcy around them. We would like to start an open dialogue between people who i openly aware of their sexuality and the people who might think these kind of topics to stay in the hidden or may like to be more open about their sexuality but don't have the confidence. We would like to push some of the norms. This does not have to be sexual norms, but we feel the lack of open dialogue in these cases in the public room. Let's challenge the curiousity. Then we had a discussion about loneliness (in every kind of social groups), and the difficulties surrounding the feeling of being alone. We would like to adress that this kind of feelings are normal and that you are not alone. We would like to connect people so that the feelings of loneliness and alienation gets lessened a little. Lets have a dialogue amongst us, that we are all the same, and we are all having these kind of feelings. All af these discussions are all sounded by a wish to confess the difficulties in life, but at the same time being anonomous. People are open to have these conversations about norms and tabus, but people often become too aware of their flaws and the chance of judgements. They are afraid of other peoples judgements therefore they hold their secrets inside. The discoussions held has let up to a start up concept about 'anonomous presence in the public'. And has the connection to our bad ideas workshop, because these ideas often are violations of many social norms.

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Where did our scenarios come from? We used the AEIOU method to define the taxonomy of the context we are working with. After we finish using this organizational framework, we analyzed our coding to develop scenarios of use

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More diagrams!!