Project Presentation

From MediaFranca

opening title

MediaFranca
designing for citizenship

This project is the counterpart of my thesis essay. In my essay I inquired about the relationship between the connectivity provided by the network and the sense of collectivity we develop within our groups. More precisely, what kinds of design strategies are necessary in order to reverse the steady decline of social capital.

territory map

In this project, I concentrated my efforts in understanding youth. Engaging youth is important because they have traditionally played a key role in civic life raising important issues and bringing new ideas into the public debate. Just remember issues such as civil rights movements, anti war movements, environmental movements, etc. But what is happening now with teenagers? How do they leverage their social capital? ^[1] According to Robert Putnam, the three basic functions of social capital are: bonding, bridging and linking. So what does networking technology has to do here? The web has enabled large-scale participation and has democratized the production tools, is supporting rapid information distribution and transparency in the delivery process. So, how can we take advantage of that?

research

Besides one-to-one interviews and surveys, the main tool used in my research was poster creation, inspired by participatory design principles. Here, teenagers (from 13 to 18) were asked to build visual narratives taking a reflective and critical stance in relation with their current use of technology. In the first session, participants were asked to identify the different social groups they interacted with (friends, family, classmates, etc.) by placing themselves in the center of the diagram and from there drawing all their connections. In the second, they were asked to depict their daily routine, mark their frequented places, their social interactions. The third was about local awareness, how information was accessed through the different settings along the day, defining flows, sources and trust relationships.

project findings

Research showed that teenagers had a sense of disconnection between physical and digital, as they were perceived as belonging to different social natures. In fact, they intersected only in very special cases. There was also a sense of dislocation with their environments: most of them didn’t have a car, they were to busy for touring, they didn’t care too much, etc. They also showed very narrow group identities, isolated in small circles of friends, specially the ones transitioning to campus life. They expressed a feeling of powerlessness regarding social affairs: any action was simply “out of their reach”. And technology was looked upon with suspicion and skepticism at the beginning but was rapidly absorbed and re-appropriated suiting their particular needs.

design implications

I developed a set of concepts where the main idea was “connecting people with issues through locality (or places)” An initial set of concepts were generated and presented to my participants for validation. They where asked to discuss their feasibility in potential scenarios of use as well as the projections they could envision from the interactions with and through the product. Now, I’d like to break down people, issues and places and examine with you their relationships:

people & places

The core idea here is to flatten the physical locality with digital media, basically understanding media as spatial annotation. This leads to a very different idea of publishing because visibility is not determined by the linking topology of the web but instead by our physical proximity to media. By connecting people to places we can inject more relevancy to our local settings and we can also find new and different opportunities for interaction with our neighbors by creating a new kind of situated media. MediaFranca is proposed as a platform where the posting of media is, at the same time, the constant negotiation of the meaning within the physical space. Is not like the “web of things” that is about turning our things into nodes of the web but rather as taking the space between them.

people & issues (1)

On the Web, people are connected to issues through communities of interest. In this: “me, you, us & them” framework, what is is interesting, is that 'US' is also a small --and paradoxilly-- individual representation. But we want to be exposed to issues outside or narrow groups. So different degrees of social proximity will determine the visibility of situated media. Peer filtering becomes a way of avoiding media pollution but also provides a pathway for exploring new relationships based upon trust. MediaFranca provides a way of maintaining groups around issues (as publics) which shape the way in which arguments are shaped (templates).

people & issues (2)

People, as publics are constructed by the emergence of new issues, therefore, the relationship of visibility is two-folded:

1. from what is socially proximal, familiar and interesting to me and
2. from what is socially relevant; relevant to the bigger public. These point towards the affairs of the overall community, understanding participation as citizenship.

This diagram shows the two axis where the diagonal could be a slider that we would toggle to define our desired scope of local information. (I’ll explain this further in our scenario).

issues & places

So, what deserves public attention? How can we model the interaction that can handle naturally this kind of negotiation? This is a simple and rather obvious approach that defines visibility (or relevancy) through the ongoing conversation of people that approve or disapprove the issue, but in a transparent way, avoiding obscure systemic biases. With MediaFranca, we can attach media to location but what is also interesting is that individual posts with ca common theme can be connected into a more robust thread of conversation.

interaction pathways

So the basic interaction pathways are defined as three:

1. How do we shape our scoping, or how do we choose to frame and filter our media,
2. How to we shape our expression, defining our publics therefore our voice, selecting templates and
3. How do we manage our social connections, our trusted sources, our subscribed groups and friends.

video sketch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7F_p_3xIcI

social interaction

This model depicts Mediafranca as a platform for allowing teenagers, and people in general, to have their own voice, not by delegating agency to technology but being able to reverse this agency to our own dialogue as individuals. From this point onwards, I’m interested in learning more about what is a socially sustainable interaction. What strategies are necessary for designing future technology were our delegation to it won’t lead us to trouble. How show we define our strategies for designing for transparency, openness, trust, reversibility? Those are the questions I leave for the future.

Notes

1. ↑ Social capital defines norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that come from social networks.