Ideation Session 1

Today we met to start ideating design concepts for the first time. Keeping the research we did in mind, we started out by asking ourselves what we might need as a reader and as a journalist.

As a Reader, we might want:

To share our perspectives. Connect with authors.
To be able to get news from multiple angles and perspectives from around the globe
To know what I’m missing
To see where a piece of content might fall on the spectrum of different viewpoints, to help expose and see where my gaps are.
To be the actual ‘scene’ where the news was created; the notion of being in-the-moment.

As a Journalist/ Publisher:

We might want to know what readers want to read? What subjects interest them? what combination of local news and global is needed?
What to know about who is reading the content?
A better way for feedback, and communication with readers.
To be able to capture the actual ‘scene’, content and feeling of the place where news is created.

We discussed the importance of different Perspectives, and brainstormed several ideas about how to visualize this. Readers should be able to find multiple nuanced perspectives on a topic. They could have different level of immersion based upon distance from the device. There could possibly be a way to visualize readers’ consumption biases, and explore related perspectives. We could also show different content headlines or summaries based on the physical orientation of the device, enabling a novel method of interaction.

Lastly, we were not fully convinced about 3D gestures on a mobile phone, though we can see the depth camera in use for recognition and capture.

Concepts

The concepts are constantly evolving, here we present a snapshot of a few of the concepts:

Flipping phone: Flips point of view on a story when you change the phone’s orientation. Shows only part of the new perspective initially so you can still orient yourself as to what you are reading. Recognizes topics from newspaper articles or what’s being watched on TV, and then pulls other similar article on the phone. Users can tilt the phone to reveal related article but written from a different perspective. It helps discovery, and going wide and deep into a topic, but would not necessarily get us to new topics.
Visualize how a story has progressed based on the context of user comments
Parallax interactions and infinite scroll in that a tablet acts more like a roll of paper
Perspective and scale (zooming in from space, Power of Ten video example)
3-way/funhouse mirror metaphor that could show you different perspectives on a story
Virtual tours that trigger information presentations to the reader based on how they view the tour at certain angles (tilting the device?)
3D video
Visualize where points of view in an article fall in a spectrum
Virtual product review desk
Origami is a flexible, half analog, half digital newspaper with tessellations. It is low cost, but a robust and durable device. It tracks the shape of the paper(screen) and displays news according to the orientation and current shape. The shape can be changed by folding and unfolding it at certain locations. The device can be taken home and updated using a mobile phone.
News stand of the future - big wall where you can view the types of stories people have been viewing while in that location - trend visualization. This might be a communal wall of news.
Projecting 3D interactive content on a flat surface - uses in-air gestures to manipulate it

From this exercise, we learned that we work best when we can visually communicate our ideas to each other, because it gives us something tangible to build on. It also lets us think about form factors and features. We also discovered that brainstorms don’t always have to be very structured. Sometimes an exercise that you planned to do during brainstorms doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to, and you have to be ready to let it go and try something else. For instance, we started out by thinking about how to come up with concepts around our design question, but didn’t come up with too many concepts, just design principles. These design principles ended up leading us to think about design concepts that might meet those principles, and that ended up being much more productive.