Design Process: Part 1

Describe in 2 or 3 sentences your design challenge or concept (event, experience, service, product).

My concept is to develop a resource center for graduate level emergent media education. It would be an open source project available online, and include papers, articles, links, images, and multimedia to be used as supplements to teaching. It would have a wiki, so documents could be updated and added to, and also include a social network, where educators around the country (or globe) could communicate, post articles, and share their own materials and practices with each other.

What is your communication goal? (to act, to learn, to experience, ...)

The goal is to provide a resource for professors so that existing emergent media courses can be made higher caliber, and to share information so that more of these courses will become available at other universities.

Do you have some initial ideas for exploration and choice of media? (Remember we are looking at the projects requirements not proposing solutions at this time.)

Emergent media is digital, so the internet is the landscape for exploration. I'm interested in how blogs and web video can be used effectively to produce messages and leverage influence, and how social networks and virtual worlds can be used for collaboration. I'd like to have a library of short videos outlining key concepts and implications of emergent media, and a collection of all the syllabi and course outlines from universities around the country that are available online. I also want to interview former and current students of the MA in Media Studies program at the New School, as well as faculty, to identify strengths and weaknesses of the current course offerings in this area and brainstorm new course possibilities.

Who is your audience (s)?

Graduate level professors interested in teaching emergent media courses.

What are the short and long term goals of you, your client and audiences?

The short term goal is compile as many quality resources together as I can in order to develop the curriculum, and to provide courses outlines and syllabi. I also want to compile a database of graduate educators and departments around the country who wouldbenefit from this resource.

The long term goal would be to build the website that would store all these resources, which would also allow users to upload their own content and edit or update materials, so it would be a collaborative knowledge center for educators.

Why will people want to watch/visit/interact with your media design? briefly address motivation and benefits.

Educators would have resources available for updating their courses, as well as ideas for new course offerings. Because users would be able to upload new material all the time, there would always be fresh, timely videos/images/text available for educators to bring to the classroom.

Research Proposal: Best Practices for Emergent Media Education

Problem:

Emergent Media education is a field that is both new, yet rapidly changing and evolving. A framework for education, combined with an online resource center should be created to help educators collaborate on establishing best practices for media literacy in the 21st century.

Proposal:

To develop a curriculum or "best practices" for graduate level Emergent Media & Future Studies education, that will be made available to share and annotate online.

Relevant contexts:

Technological development is accelerating at an exponential rate. In order for new media education to be valid, it will have to have the ability and flexibility to adapt strategies to rapid change.

The way we interact with each other via collaborative environments is still in development, and so our understanding of the societal and cultural implications of this are also evolving.

Being able to understand short and long-term effects of emergent media requires a level of future studies education - strategic foresight development, systems thinking, etc

Staying up do date on information to be integrated into the education will require a collaborative effort, not only interdepartmentally, but ideally on a national or even global level. Part of understanding the new media landscape is to use the tools of the environment.

Students need to be able to create media that illustrates their ability to communicate strategically, not just create aesthetic design.

Similar projects:

New Media Literacies Community Site - Project New Media Literacies (NML) is a research initiative funded in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program to explore how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise the publics’ understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world.
(This site is geared toward youth education, not graduate level, but provides a tremendous amount of applicable content.)

Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Education

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

Competition:

I envision this to be an open source project, so there's not really "competition". Any similar or relevant material out there is a resource.

Approaches to design:

I imagine a social network like ning.com would be a good platform for building the knowledge network, combined with a wiki to build the database. And it will have to be pretty.

The Rhizomatic Underground

The following is a brief summary of the rhizome reading, followed by my takeaway:

- The term “rhizome” is used to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. (Wikipedia)

Characteristics of a Rhizome
1. Connection – any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything else
2. Heterogeneity – Because of its ability to connect anything with anything, it is by nature decentralized. Ability to connect diverse, dissimilar elements.
3. Multiplicity – It can’t be distilled down to a single source/root/location, as in a tree structure. Everything is woven together as a fabric. I imagine a social graph:
4. Asignifying rupture – You can rupture the rhizome, but you can’t destroy it! New pathways will be formed. This reminds me of tinker toys….you could pull this half apart…but just put a stick thingy in a new spindle hole, and the process begins again:
5. Cartography – the rhizome is map and not a tracing; it is open, connectable, detachable, with multiple entryways; it does not need to follow preset pathways
6. Decalcomania – there’s a mouthful. Constant adaptation via iteration.

Essentially, I feel that the point in the article was to introduce a different model of how we interpret processes. Human nature leads us to want to compartmentalize, organize, label, and structure. Because of our perception of the existence of time, we tend to do this in a linear fashion. We also look at things not only as they are located in time, but also in space. This leads us to the faulty thinking that things necessarily have to follow linear pathways in specific locations. The comparison is made to the roots of a tree. Instead, it would do us well to see processes as relational, interwoven, “proceeding from the middle”. Like the ants in my graphic above, you don’t know where they begin or end or where they’re going, and it doesn’t matter. The rhizome has the characteristic of pure potentiality; it can manifest in different ways, without being confined by the “rules” of various modes of operation. It encourages flexibility, adaptation, and creativity.

“The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.” (Wikipedia)

The notion of rhizome as process serves particularly well when attempting to understand and create new systems of collaboration, interaction, and interface….as with swarm architecture, where the e-motive house/hyperbody serves as a complex adaptive system, interacting with and responding to us, but also acting as extensions of ourselves. The pieces of the hyperbody all operate in relation to each other; monitoring, calculating, shifting and adapting based on incoming and outgoing information flow. We don’t visualize all flow in terms of “I perform this function/command, house responds with ‘x’”, rather we envision an evolving symbiotic relationship between us and it. For instance, imagine this:

In tomorrow’s home, all systems will operate on a single network. You’ll probably create an avatar to represent your home, fitted with a name & personality. He/she/it may appear on a screen on the wall when you come home, giving you a snapshot of the house’s status: temperature, energy usage, etc. It’s system will be linked to your phone too, so you can change the home’s settings and monitor activity from your handheld device. Since your phone is equipped with GPS, your house will also know when you’re on your way home, and can turn on your favorite radio station when you walk through the door, and perhaps draw a bath for you, at the temperature you find ideal. The walls will be covered with interactive wallpaper, so you can change the color or scene displayed based on your mood. The packaging on all the food in your fridge and pantry is RFID equipped, so your home can suggest recipes for dinner based on what you have in stock, as well as alert you when expiration dates are drawing near. Your house may also be linked to the grocery store, and will let you know when your favorite foods are on sale. The roof has solar panels, which move over the course of the day to absorb the maximum amount of sunlight. The windows are composed of electrified privacy glass, eliminating the need for blinds. The house automatically activates/disables this function in order to maintain optimal temperature within the house at all times. The windowpanes also capture sunlight and transfer the energy to photovoltaic cells, helping to reduce your electricity bill. Lights automatically turn on/off as you move through the house….

OK, I could go through each room of the house with this example, but I hope I’ve illustrated the idea of using the rhizome metaphor to understand the potentiality of interactive systems. Though there are deliberate exchanges between us and house, the house also functions as an outgrow of ourselves, perhaps challenging our beliefs in what we define as ‘self’ altogether…at the same time, house is interacting with itself, and perhaps with systems outside the immediate network. There’s no specific location of House…it’s a networked environment, its existence distributed. Its evolution is based on its ability to interact with other networks, and with us. Though this example is just about House, the same premise extends to all architecture, until we’re a part of a holistic, information-dense, and intelligent environment.

…and that’s why I want to live in the future.

Inspiration, My Design Personality

things that inspire me

my design personality

• i am practical. i like things that are simple, intuitive, functional, tidy, clean.

• i like to think, learn, explore, research, follow a trail and see where it leads. i prefer to be on the front end of projects.

• i like change. i expect diversions. i am adaptable.

• ideas make me thrive. i am conceptual. i like finding the connection between things.

• i like flow, in accordance with nature, human centered design, our created world as extension of self.

• i am critical. i think about how things could be better/easier/more beautiful.

• i'm future-focused. i imagine things unknown/undiscovered/not yet in existence.

media experience:

i'm interested in new media. i worked for social media company for a few years, blogging, interviewing, and doing research about how new and upcoming technologies are impacting the future of humanity. i'm not working in the media field now, but i am trying to get an internship at a design/innovation firm. i would also like to teach. (i just started my first TA position this semester, so hopefully it will be a good introduction and give me some experience).