User:Joca/proposal draft v5
Proposal V5
What do want to make?
Within this project I want to research the role of the interface in the field of digital news media on how people interpret information. I am especially interested in how an interface could facilitate critical insight while reading the news, and I think that a conversational interface like a smart speaker can be a good medium for that.
To answer that question I want to design a series of voice interfaces to engage with news. Each of these interfaces would have its own personality that represents a way of looking at the news. This can be connected to a particular politic view (populist, liberal) or a way of thinking (rationalistic, humanistic). The personality is reflected in the way the interfaces talk, but also in the design of the smart speaker they 'live' in.
The content that is used by the speakers will be scraped from existing online news media. I think of using text and podcasts, two media that would work well with an audio-based interface.
In terms of interaction between human and system, I'd like to challenge the idea of the conversational interface as an digital assistant only. I foresee a deceptive collection of interfaces, where the populist smart speaker would make trustworthy sources look unreliable. And maybe the rationalistic speaker forces you to hear an advertorial, to make sure the commercial goals of the publication are met. This approach leaves space for a humorous and provocative approach. I think that is a more effective way to show the influence of interface on how people experience the content in it, and make the audience connect with the topic.
In that way, the graduation project forms a bridge to the thesis. In this work I want to analyze existing designs of news media to see where they already try to facilitate in the interface practices like critical reading. My starting point to connect these examples is a theoretical framework called Performative Materiality (Drucker, 2013). This model emphasizes the interpretative event influenced by a digital object. It sees materiality of an interface as a set of characteristics that could start an individual experience of reading and understanding.
Having this focus, the thesis offers a great way for me to get insights in the design of my graduation project. And the other way around, I can reflect on what I make by having this more analytical position in the thesis.
Why do you want to make it.
Journalism is an interesting field to design for, as many societal phenomena meet in this field. Currently, the most used news media are digital. And there are still challenges in how to design for that. To what extent is the front page relevant, if most of the news is published on external platforms? How do people detect fake news? How do you win trust as a journalistic publication, and how is this trust abused?
In that sense journalism is wicked, both exciting and possibly open to evil.
In exploring the issues I mentioned, the role of the visual language of journalism is often neglected. And as a digital medium, the interface is the most prominent aspect of that visual language.
Currently, the dominant principles for interface are drafted from design practices that originate from the field of Human Computer Interaction. These are based on solving problems efficiently, creating a user-centered design to fulfill a task and reach a goal as quick and easy as possible. This might be effective for e-commerce, but are these the best principles for interfacing journalism?
In Graphesis (2014), Johanna Drucker describes interface design that is focused on displaying ambiguity, and offers ways to structure critical insights. She coins the term Humanistic Interface for this. In the book she stays on a distant, theoretical level stating that these type of interface is still 'in its infancy'.
I believe this is worth to research how such an interface could look and work for digital news media.
Relation to a larger context
The value and role of journalism are part of a large debate in society. It is addressed by research institutions like the Nieman Journalism Lab, the Poynter Institute and the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek.
New publications are founded by start-ups like Vox Media, The Correspondent and Buzzfeed. The latter started Buzzfeed News, because it sees potential in offering serious journalism next to the juicy listicles it got known for. (Saba, 2014)
At the same time, technology companies like Apple, Facebook and Google try to aggregrate different news sources to become the ultimate platform to distribute content to a bigger audience.
Looking at interface, the field of user experience design got a lot of traction. User experience is part of many curricula of courses in design and computer science. Data Analytics firms like Nielsen popularized interaction patterns developed originally in academic research in Human Computer Interaction.
(This part feels a bit fragmented. And there are some statements made which need a better support in the form of either a reference, or more transparency in my way of reasoning towards this statement)
How do you plan to make it?
For the conversational interfaces I want to design I am planning to use content of existing news publishers. This is possible by scraping the content of their websites using a script. To use audio content, I need to add an extra step to transcribe the content to make the information machine readable.
I'd like to have the interfaces running on individual smart speakers, that are based on a Raspberry Pi with a voice-assistant focused system image like MyCroft or Jasper. The advantage of this approach is that I am not fully depending on the cloud services of Google and Amazon. This support archiving the project in the future, and is conceptually interesting: Do we really need the cloud for these type of projects?
It is a good basis to further develop for the graduation show. I aim to take a more spatial approach there, maybe in the form of an installation where the different parts of the interface are shown next to relevant parts of the thesis.
Who can help you and how?
Internal: Clara, Amy → conceptual and visual
Michael, Andre → Prototyping, technical realization
Marloes and Steve → Articulating the research in proper writing
XPUB squad → Overview, relation to other projects
Looking into ways to connect this project to the field of journalism:
- Aced (ACED is a platform for design and journalism with the aim of promoting interdisciplinary collaboration between the artistic and journalistic field. )
- Stimuleringsfonds voor de journalistiek
- Friends working as journalists
- Revisiting contacts made during realization of the mini research project that was part of my senior year in high school, which touched upon the samen topics as this project
- Olia Lialina
Relation to previous practice
Before I started at Experimental Publishing, I already had some experience in writing and journalism. During my bachelors I learned about interaction design, for both tangible and digital interfaces. Pairing these experiences with what I learned about critical theory and digital culture at the Piet Zwart, I see a good starting point to dive into this topic and connect these different perspectives.
Looking at the projects of last year, both the non-human librarians and reading the structure intervene with content, in such a way that it opens up questions about the interface, and its influence on how users perceive the content via it; be it a text, or an entire collection of books. The interfaces I designed during my Bachelor's have a different background, based on the principles of Human Computer interaction.
What is your timetable?
Please include a timeline of what needs to be done and the order in which those things will be done.
Based on the talks with Aymeric, and on experience of further students I envision the following rough planning. In a next step I should make at least the path up untill January more specific.
This should be in mentioning exact dates, of which most are already set in the general planning for the second year. Besides that I think that it is valuable to be explicit about which deliverables I want to have finished.
Oktober/November - Thesis outline and project proposal. Setting up framework of bibliography. Scoping the project (using insights from prototyping)
November/December - Writing first chapter, further prototyping
January - Further writing. Evaluating prototypes made so far. Further developing specific directions
February/March - Further writing, first complete draft thesis. Realizing project. Detailing form and production process of thesis.
May/June - Finetuning thesis and project. Producing the items needed to make the project presentable during the graduation show (and beyond. Online, possibly other events etc.
July - Total madness, showtime. Sleep.
References
Mentioned in this draft:
Drucker, Johanna (2013) DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface. Digital Humanities Quarterly. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html
Drucker, J. (2014). Graphesis: Visual forms of knowledge production. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Saba, J. (2014, February 23). Beyond cute cats: How BuzzFeed is reinventing itself. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-media-buzzfeed/beyond-cute-cats-how-buzzfeed-is-reinventing-itself-idUSBREA1M0IQ20140223