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.