During the second and final year of graduate school I worked on a research and design project related to news, design and storytelling. I created a platform and UI called Newskite, to engage people around the world about major global current affairs. This project helps understand what people are hearing in our connected but disjointed world. What are people in Peru hearing about the earthquake in Japan? How is did the Arab Spring affect how people in China thought about policy? Newskite brings those answers.
Presentation Video
Scrub to 01:02:00 for my 15 minute talk. You can follow along with the slide deck below.
Slidedeck
Audio Stories Below are the audio stories from actual people in other countries making calls and telling stories about what they’re hearing in the news about our global events.
Full stories
Poster
Gratitude
Thank you to very many many people but especially to professor Hans Ibold who pushed me hardest and mentored me more than anyone else at Indiana University.
Feedback
I also received constructive feedback written commentary.
Wesley Michaels and I tracked him down in Boulder and asked if he would share his insights with our peers who couldn’t make it to the conference. His invitation was part of our semester long research and design project to improve the professional development resources for HCI Master’s students in the School of Informatics and Computing at IU.
Much of our community is struggling to communicate what we do and why it is important. Carl emphasized how important it is for us to tell stories that have characters and tangible examples. Otherwise, people will continue thinking we do magic, or do nothing. The best thing we can do is open a dialogue with people who don’t understand what we do and above all–thank them for being interested in the first place.
Major Points
An example would be useful about now. Got a GPS device in front of you? Talk about it.
Tell an “IxD at work” story that people can see.
Don’t sweat the edge case. It’s ok to start by saying we make website or phone apps. Something like that is tangible and can open a dialogue.
It is your job to shield the world from IxD’s internal debates.
Start where the listener is. Think of your listeners as users. Then have a user-centered designed conversation. You know how to do that!
Q&A with students
Is UX and IxD a buzzword? Not necessarily. A buzz word is when usage exceeds comprehension and maybe more people are using the word but don’t know what it means.
The best work comes from identifying part of a project where you can have an impact.
The industry will benefit as a whole from students coming from young programs. From schools will come more agreements on terminology and practice in the profession.
It’s common and expected for interaction designers to inherit and learn new tools fast.
There is a difference between user research and market research just as there is a difference between users and consumers. When designers engage in research they come out of their research transformed and empathetic.
Getting excited about work is essential. You can begin to think, “do you have any idea of what this will mean to people!?” When you have a person in mind you can really talk about solutions and begin to solve them.
Play well with others.
People can be very creative. Even or especially non-designers. Let them know you realize that and draw on it. Be interested in them and make sure they know.
What is it called when our minds see something in nature that looks and feels like a remediation of technology? Deremediation? Probably not, because I made up that word.
For example, Instagr.am is an service that lets people saturate and filter their photos. They are what researchers Bolter and Grusin would call a remediation of old film cameras. Months ago I was driving on highway 280 near Half-Moon Bay between San Francisco and Mountain View. I thought the rocks I was seeing looked a lot like the fake rocks I saw at the Universal Studio’s movie set. The movie set rocks were of course meant to look like real, natural rocks.
What is it then? What is it called when our mind begins processing things in the natural world as if they are produced by technology? Maybe it’s not anything except you thinking I’ve gone absolutely mad.
There’s lots of news today about the Russian region that’s worth your attention. The above is the image on Google.com of “Russia’s Yuri Gagarin on Tuesday, replacing the logo on its homepage with an image of the first man in space and a rocket that a visitor can launch with a cursor.”
Celebrating Space Exploration The BBC reported Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says space exploration is still a priority for Russians. For the international community, we can argue important attention to further the sciences is good news. Celebrations for 50 years of space exploration. Great. However this anniversary for Russians comes with unfortunate reports from neighboring Belarussians.
Bombs in Belarus
In Belarus, security is extra tight today after a bomb killed 12 and wounded 150 people in a Subway Blast, a country otherwise known to be a relatively peaceful place. For those skimming past the little sister of Russia, attention is back on Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
Eyes on Chernobyl The severity of the nuclear crisis rating in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant has risen from 5 to the highest level 7 today. This level has only been reached once before in the 1968 Chernobyl (now Ukraine, then USSR) disaster. Though, the amount of radiation leaks is on the decline, it’s unknown if the case is as severe as in the then USSR.
On Design So how do these smattering of news stories fit into this blog? Each bit in this roundup poses a design challenge. These are a serious, big, enormous design problems that really mean something. Industrial, communication, travel, information, experience, interaction, graphic, material design. All of that and more. Well designed user experience is essential here. It counts–maybe even more–in a high risk scenario. Good design is not always making people “feel good” but a holistic, felt understanding of complex individuals, groups, politics, constraints and environments we must consider when design something that effects people.
Designers, engineers, techies and media people alike, I bet something above has something to do with what you’re working on today. It’s your job to think about it even if the Soviet Empire’s fall lives in your history books. How unfortunate would it be if we closed our eyes to the rest of the world and dipped into a Rooseveltian Isolationism? *sniff* Do I smell a New Deal? Designers working on policy is a whole different (exciting) conversation. Food for thought. I hope I didn’t ruin your Tuesday.
The Chemical Brothers track Leaving Home just came on my Last.fm radio. What timing.
My entire life has changed because of f.lux. I usually wake up before sunrise and when I don’t it’s because I have worked late into the night. Throughout the day f.lux adjusts the tints on my screen with based on my location and time of day. At night, my screen has a slight red-orange hue (tungsten) that keeps me from squinting at my computer and burning my eyeballs. Doing graphic design work that requires precise attention to detail and color? No problem, there’s an easily accessible feature to disable f.lux for an hour. If you try this for a week and still don’t love it, I’ll give you your money back!
Big surprise that I read a lot of news–from a lot of different sources. Blogs, journals, news sites and so on. Because the media industry wants us to click on more links, more share buttons and more ads we are bombarded with visual noise. Readability is a bookmarklet you can add to your toolbar that wipes all of that away. I dream of a day when design is so good we don’t need Readability. But until then, one click to quiet salvation is not so bad.
This is way I wish all technology worked, quietly in the background. The one click Chrome extension makes all New York Times stories one page. You know that 12-page essay about lemon farming in Brazil? While you’re clicking next, next next, I’m smooth sailing down down the coast Rio sipping lemonade and not a penny spent. I wish I had this for the entire internet.
New York Times Standard vs New York Times with Adblocker
I did some browser to browser comparisons and the free Adblock definitely works. It also apparently it won the about.com Reader’s Choice Award in 2011–for what that’s worth to you. My favorite part is no longer having twirling, dancing motion ads crying for attention. Hulu ads got you down? Try pressing the “mute” button; that trick always works.
There is an remarkable amount of opportunity to do game changing work in the journalism space. There always has been and there always will be. Why? Because there will always be uncovered stories, truths and narratives to be told. There are always people, problems and more than two sides to an issue.
I’ll start by telling you about my transition from being a news designer to interaction designer. Then I’ll talk about visual.ly at large.
I’ve been asked how I made the leap from one field to the other. Really, folks, they are one in the same to me. Both roles share the same toolbelt: sketch, iterate, prototype, reflect, tell stories, interview, explore, think big, collaborate, write and design at all fidelities.
People ask me why I made the leap
Why did I jump the journalism ship? For me, there really was no other choice. I wanted to improve the quality of how we learn about what’s happening in our world, what I think news does. To do this, I needed new tools in my tool design belt. So, I went back to graduate school to study HCI.
The other reason I jumped ship is actually quite sad. I tried and tried and tried to motivate digital approaches at various media organizations I worked for–not just one in particular. And my freshly graduated tech savvy peer/colleague journalist friends were all trying to do the same thing. Some have been successful. But most of us realized weren’t going to get anywhere until publishers were willing to invest in the future of digital, in a real, thoughtful, way.
Sure the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and other major news hubs pump out fantastic digital work. But we don’t talk as much about solutions for readers of all the gazettes, journals and couriers across the country. That’s why creating a platform can be so powerful.
I wasn’t going to make progress any time soon in the old boys club, so, I jumped. I didn’t want to spend any more time commemorating the good ol’ days, I wanted to design for the future.
Do I look back? Of course. Do I want to go back? No. Am I obsessively grateful for all of the brilliant mentors and experiences I’ve had? Of course.
People ask why I went to graduate school
In my grad school application I said I wanted to work on the news problem. I said I would graduate and leave the traditional news community for a while and arm myself with education and experience at smart tech companies. And when the timing and opportunity is right, I would work in this opportunity space again. I had a really nice metaphor with light and darkness.
People are doing things outside journalism that benefit media
I’m writing this post today because it relates to visua.ly which has me oozing with excitement.
Watch their demo at 500 startups. Scrub to about 34 minutes in.
The cofounders, Stewart Langille and Lee Sherman come most recently from Mint.com, the infographic heaven for visualized data about your money. They are taking advantage of a space and area that has never been more important and had more opportunity. Watch the video and see how they view the future.
They are trying to solve the problem of “big data” and are “targeting publishing and advertising.” A publisher has a monthly with subscription with Visual.ly which connect them with third party data sets, designers, analysts and an an editor who oversees the creations of these visualizations.
I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it again, if journalists in newsrooms don’t take serious, thoughtful action to move the news industry forwards, other people will. Quoting myself:
Newspapers, radio and cable television should be taught in media history classes. Students should be taught to produce for and think about Mobile apps, Google and Apple TV, Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Environments, Chat clients, Facebook, Twitter, Bloggers, GPS devices, etc. The list goes on and on. If the medium is the message, it’s time to open our eyes to everything else out there.
We should have invented Twitter. We should have invented RSS feeds. We should have invented Craigslist and Groupon and Youtube and the iPad and Google Search and Yelp. It’s okay to hire developers. It’s okay to take a risk. If people inside the news industry don’t change the model, people outside will.
10 August 2010
Visual.ly “gives publishers the horse power of a New York Times visualization team without the cost; New York Times has 40 people on their visualization.” It’s curated crowdsourcing. “Using our data, or their own, users can grab-and-go making amazing visualizations” the founders say.
So, to my dear friends in newsrooms, fighting the good fight, every day, whatever you do, keep moving forward. If your editor is not taking advantage of your potential, work for someone who will. If no one will, start doing whatever you think needs to be done, yourself.
Thoughts to tuck in your brain for the next time you’re thinking about intuitive, easy-to-use design. Print design is old. They have been iterating for a while.
Google made a computer. A laptop, a notebook. It does one thing and it wants to do it well: go online. The entire operating system is a browser. Open it up: browse, post, read, chat. If you can do it in a browser, you should be able to do it on this notebook, the CR-48.
I’ve been playing with my Chrome Notebook (CR-48) for a few days. It came to me in the mail last week as a gift from a friend at Google. But, I’m still not comfortable calling it a CR-48; I’m not a robot.
The first use experience was better than most computers but did not have a magical presentation like Apple’s packaging. I had to ruffle through a few layers of plastic to get to my computer. The battery came charged and setup should have been easy except I had to wait at least 15 minutes for the OS to upgrade which was just long enough to be a buzz kill. The very subtle smiley face has been an incredibly redeeming factor.
The notebook came with a large sheet of stickers to lay over the cover. The undesigned looking design of the notebook begs for it to be personalized. I’m far from being a “bumper sticker person” on my cars, guitars, bikes and computers but the silicone-like texture and very neutral design politely asks, “please make me yours.” I’m now making a personal relationship with my notebook, de-homogenizing it. Slapping a few stickers on the machine transformed it from a CR-48 to my notebook.
I, like may people, lay in bed and on the couch with my laptop. I prop my knees up and type across my lap. But computers that overheat either leave my legs burned or require me to put on a snuggie. This notebook does not set fire to my flesh, and to no surprise, it is wicked fast. As someone who only uses Google Apps for word and spreadsheet processing, this notebook makes sense for me. However, it is not compatible with the Indiana University wireless secure network nor Netflix (and Hulu is sometimes choppy) deeming it significantly less useful for me, at least while I’m in Bloomington.
Below are my major pros and cons with the my notebook. I have only been using it a week and am only reviewing the features I found myself needing so far. I’m primarily a heavy, Macbook Pro user and have been using a desktop pc 20 hours a week for work at Indiana University.
Pros
It does not overheat (and burn my thighs)
Chat persistent across tabs
Easy setup thanks to sync
Pleasant logoless design
Fast startup and shut down
Great battery life
It is narrow, durable and light enough for me to slip in my purse
It has a keyboard
It has a search button
It has a video camer (though I haven’t used it yet)
Important buttons on the keyboard are bigger (shift, arrow, search)
Cons
Gmail loads with a horizontal scrollbar
For a computer that’s just a browser, it’s quite heavy
The tint of the screen at night burns my eyeballs (maybe because I’m a f.lux user)
Minor adjustment needed from Macbook Pro keyboard
Does not connect to Indiana University Wireless
Difficulty switching between wireless networks across different locations (home, work, starbucks, etc)
Does not stream Netflix
Streams Hulu slowly
I cannot figure out how to sign out of chat
The letters on the keypad are impossible to see at night
Trackpad is fussy and sometimes unresponsive
How does it stand against the iPad? Well, at this point, iPad with the keyboard mate seems like a better bet. But who knows what the future holds and how much one of these puppies will cost?
