The crit ended up going well. I decided to present my experiments as the ‘final’ work, because I felt there wasn’t much point in trying to state that I was in any way near the useful resolution of the product. However in terms of the brief I am ready to put this project on the backburner, but I do need to continue it.
Generally people understood my intentions much better than in the interim crit. I think this was because the work I showed actually communicated them in a much more real way that the terrible mockup of before.
I made clear that I intended to keep this project going and refine it some more, this was accepted as being a good idea.
However I am not totally sure what my next steps would be… I think to make the printed paper a little less rough might be a good idea, and perhaps to create multiple options that I had previously thought of, such as the lite, culture heavy, sunday edition, etc.
This was another experiment in a different format. I wondered if you could have the paper read out to you as a kind of on demand radio. This way all consumers of the newspaper would experience it at the same time. I input the content created that I would have printed into a text-to-speach program. This was strange as the voice was very mechanised. If you listen to the end of this utube you will see that the bullitins and normal news stories are almost gibberish, but the blogpost read at the end was good because the use of language was more like the spoken word.
My current brief is critical prototypes. It is set by Sadhna and is about using prototyping process so take a break in the design process and ensure that design work truely reflects the human interaction with a product.
I am doing the newspaper, and this has ended up including the iphone news app I use and some of the blogs I read.
In the first week I made a mock up proposal of a newspaper printed at home that was created on demand from internet based news sources and included both newspaper content and content from selected blogs. My mock up was pretty crap and didn’t communicate my intentions to the group in the first crit. So I’ve taken a step back and started again pulling at the newspaper consumption form.
I wrote these guideline intentions:
<CLEAR INTENTIONS FOR DAILY CUSTOM PAPER>
~ READING THE NEWS[PAPER] ON MY PHONE AT THE KITCHEN TABLE EXCLUDES THOSE AROUND ME FROM MY NEWS CONSUMPTION. I CANNOT EASILY AND SIMPLY SHARE THE NEWS ARTICLE WITH THE PERSON I AM WITH [EVEN THOUGH IT IS EASY TO EMAIL/TWEET/FACEBOOK!]
~ THIS IS A CONTINUOUS PROBLEM WITH SCREEN BASED NEWS[PAPERS] AS THEY FORCE INDIVIDUALS TO EXIST ON THEIR INDIVIDUAL SCREENS. WHY NOT JUST EXIST IN THE SAME ROOM SHARING A PHYSICAL ITEM
~ SO I DONT WANT TO GO OUT AND BUY A NEWSPAPER. I AM AT THE START OF MY MORNING ROUTINE AND NOT READY TO GO OUTSIDE. I DON’T WANT TO SUBSCRIBE BECAUSE THERE WILL OFTEN BE WASTE. I HAVE A PRINTER SO WHY NOT PRINT MY OWN?
~ ALSO I DON’T READ ALL OF A NEWSPAPER AND DON’T WANT OR WASTE MONEY OR RESOURCES ON THE PARTS I DONT WANT
~ AND SOMETIMES I WANT TO READ WRITING BY JOURNALISTS [OR PEOPLE] WHO ARE NOT PUBLISHED IN THE SPECIFIC PAPER I READ
~ BUT IT IS ALL THERE ONLINE, I CAN ACCESS THIS STUFF THAT WAY. BUT WE ARE BACK TO THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM OF A PERSONAL BUBBLE THAT EXCLUDES THE PEOPLE WHO ARE IN THE ROOM WITH ME.
~ LET ALONE THE CONSTANT STRAIN ON MY EYES FROM LOOKING AT MY IPHONE SCREEN.
The first thing I did was to produce a paper-sharable version of my iphone news app. This was made by not scanning [because u cant scan a iphone!] but photographing and laying out what I chose to read when I used the app. Here is a grab of what I printed:
