Thesis Project Problem
From MediaFranca
Contents |
Civic Engagement
Young people have grown up living substantial portions of their lives online: seeking entertainment, social relationships, and expression. Even as it is clear that participation in online communities is important for most young people, it is less clear how, or how often, this translates into public voice or political participation.
In addition to learning how online networks and communities may be able to rekindle conventional political participation, scholars and practitioners must also learn how creative uses of digital technologies by young people are expanding the boundaries of politics and public issues. In what ways do protests in gaming communities, music file sharing, or fan petitioning of music companies constitute political behaviors? Do the communication skills and action patterns in these familiar areas of online life transfer to more familiar political realms such as voting and public protest? Perhaps most importantly, what can we learn about civic life online that might help young citizens make these transfers more effectively and more often? 1
Civic Disengagement and Design responsibility
The last three decades have been ones of precipitous decline in the civic health in western societies in general. Whether measured by participation in community affairs, voter turnout, trust in institutions or people, the quality of public discourse, or attention to and knowledge of public affairs, people appear increasingly disconnected from each other and from public life.
Engaging youth is important for reasons connected to the past, present and future. First, young people (from teenagers to young adults) have traditionally played a key role in civic life. The major social and political US reforms since World War II (e.g., the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, women’s, antinuclear and environmental movements) all depended on the idealism, ideas, voices and action of the young. One need not agree with these movements’ goals or outcomes to see that much of the energy that powers civic life in America is generated by our youth.
Second, there are many important policy issues currently facing America that require public attention to be effectively addressed. One need only consider the range of efforts supported by the Trusts--to protect the environment, improve health and human services, create a national dialogue on cultural policy, improve the quality of education, foster the connection between religion and civic life, improve the quality of campaign and elections--to see that a more engaged youth will be essential to public deliberation, citizen participation, and thus private- and public-sector action.
Third, the future of democratic life depends on youth. As discussed later, the habits of citizenship develop early in one’s adult life, and once developed are not easily changed. Today’s disengaged teenagers will become tomorrow’s disengaged and nihilistic citizens, resulting in even greater overall declines in participation. In short, increasing the civic engagement of young adults is critical not only because they are an important segment of the citizenry, but because as they go, so goes democratic life more broadly.
What design strategy do we need to develop to overcome this crisis? What kind of theoretical framework do we need to embrace in order to act upon this wicked problem?
The networked Public Domain
The semantic web allows accurate an extensive knowledge representations. The way we are shaping the record of knowledge is shifting towards a different model: from indexes (libraries), categories (knowledge fields), topics (within disciplines) and taxonomies (custom tags for our web resources) into ontological knowledge representations (concept maps).
The new way of understanding and sharing these artifacts (boundary objects) will afford custom approaches, lightening conventional standards and fitting our own mental models. But the complexity of these grammars require a clear interface that people will understand and use.
This project aims to create visual tools for authoring personalized knowledge representations for teenagers, fitting their needs of expression.
Congnitive Model
Custom knowledge representations can serve as cognitive tools for empowering the expressive capabilities of people, by fitting their specific mental models. This means that we can build spliciltly for more internal cognitive layers. (Adapted model from The Evolution of Cognitive Maps by Ervin Lazlo]
Design Goals
- Design a product that can empower users to engage in deeper relationships with their immediate surroundings. The traditional computer interface neglects rich physical interaction, weakening the relevancy of the near.
- Support strong communication relationships between people switching the communication about mode into a communication with mode.
- Support malleable ecology of information, where users can affect their surroundings and raise the awareness of the effects of their actions. (malleable descriptions, private-shared metadata and custon filtering techniques
Preliminary Concepts
- A transparent Web Service that supports the creation of personalized ontologies that work as filters for information, they aim to be accurate representations of shared or private resources. This tool will support awareness and may encourage political participation of teenagers.
- This service is a browser-like extension that works in different realms, such as:
- social realm:
- I select my contacts, my referents, my buddies. I can share and merge knowledge models in the form of beliefs, ideals and principles
- how the others see me
- how I see others
- academic realm: (everybody is a researcher of somekind in terms of performing a + or - structured inquiry)
- I state my topics, my fountains
- My influences
- My conections
- logistical realm:
- the artifacts I control
- the relationships between them, their availability to others
- social realm:
