CRITIQUE & LAUNCHING POINT

Throughout the two-day think tank, many important themes continued to rise to the surface: community journalism, user customization, paperless/mobile, engaging/fun content.

Below, I want to describe some of the observations I made about the process and the people as well as briefly critique each prototype. Then make some kind of inspirational statement about what happens next.

Observations

It was very difficult for us all to break out of our comfort zones. I likened our first day to us playing Pong, tossing the same ideas back ‘n’ forth inside of a box. Many of us came prepared to talk about our areas of interest or our own ideas but IDEO does not work on a predestined premise. Their approach is meant to create ideas from scratch based on everyone’s knowledge.
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GROUP 3 PROTOTYPE

The concept

Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”

This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
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GROUP 2 PROTOTYPE

The concept

This group wanted to develop a point system on a news website. For every activity users do, they receive points. People receive more or less points depending on their level of engagement. For example, commenting on a story nets maybe 2 points, but writing your own story is worth 10.

The site basically becomes a customized delivery system with an incentive to participate in democracy. [...]

GROUP 1 PROTOTYPES

The concept

They wanted to create a news experience around a physical public space, likened to town halls of Benjamin Franklin’s day. So they chose to partner with places like Starbucks, Wal-Mart and other congregation areas within communities.

In doing this, you create a cohesive community that centers around news, interest-based conversations and tasty merchandise.

As a business model, you’re giving incentive to companies to participate and encourage participation with the news and other media companies. This allows journalists to go where the people go instead of forcing them to come to the news, enforcing a beat system and community-driven content.

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DISCOVERIES AND HIGHLIGHTS

How might we?

The rest of the day was spent identifying a series of problems in journalism. I unfortunately can only speak for my group but I think these were important points:

• News is horribly fragmented/decentralized
• Journalists produce for journalists because there is no reliable system of feedback from readers
• If readers need to learn “media literacy” there is a design flaw in media

With these and other problems, we must ask “how might we do X?” This is the part where we get to be wild and crazy. Here you come up with questions surrounding these problems.

Brainstorm

On day two we get to brainstorm ways to solve these how might we questions. For these we thought of a few ideas:

• Decentralized news: Create a system that allows people to get all of their news in one place.
• Journalists for journalists: Create a people’s choice awards for journalism. Pulitzer Prizes are all well and good but not when they don’t measure the impact of a story on a community. Or do a reality show about journalism where people can vote on their stories or journalists (Las Vegas Sun internship on TV). Or make a system, such as Spot.Us where readers assign stories instead of editors

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THE PROCESS

IDEO has a particular approach they use to invent or redesign products. They are a design firm with clients ranging from Bank of America to bicycle stores to cleaning companies.

Here is part 1 of a video about IDEO’s process. You can find the rest on YouTube:

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If newspapers were designed like web sites, they might look something like this. And really I didn’t even have enough space to fully enliven the evil of 200 links on a homepage. Arguably, this is actually better looking than a web site because there’s a mostly defined grid and navigable objects, plus everything is much [...]

My design brain has reactivated and I’m thinking like a Web designer for the first time. There’s a huge problem with the web: there’s too much damn space.
When people told me “there’s unlimited space” on the web, I thought they meant memory and servers. I think half of them did mean that. The other half [...]