Communication Design Studio: Project 1
WEEK 1 — CLASS 1
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
What did you learn from today’s class activities and how do they impact your thinking of communication design?
Today we all met virtually for the first time due to COVID-19 campus restrictions. Admittedly, I felt a strange mix of excitement and hesitation. Soon a mix of wind-up toys appeared on my screen and Stacie Rohrbach, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design, kicked-off our first classroom activity.
Stacie pointed to the group of toys and asked us to interpret how the toy might work based solely on the form of the toy. Our perspective was fixed. We could not handle the toys. We had to use only our background and experience to intuit what we were looking at and how it might function.
Through this experiment, I learned that some of my thoughts were validated once Stacie wound-up the toy and let it go while other assumptions were flat wrong. Some toys were misleading, looking older than they were, by design. Others exhibited delightful and unexpected actions that made the group laugh. Some were so abstract it was hard to infer any valuable meaning, but as Stacie pointed out, there is value in abstraction. As humans, we all like some kind of challenge. We don’t like to see the whole picture. We also like surprises (like the jumping dragonfly)! So how can we as designers intentionally build that into the things that you make, or remove the ambiguity when it does not have any utility?
We also learned that in communication design it is sometimes very important to make something clear and concise, while other times it’s beneficial and acceptable to leave room for ambiguity.
During this exercise, I realized how important my sense of touch was. I missed all of the tactile clues these objects could give me. Some who the visual design wasn’t enough. When touching the objects one can expect feedback kind of like haptics on the iPhone. And I realized that these are important tools of communication too.
In the second half of the class, we revisited the Miro board where the class had previously answered questions about themselves on virtual post-it notes. Teams we assigned to think about ways to organize the information. My team was team 5 and was made up of Aashrita Indurti, Catherine Yocum, Karen Escarcha, and myself. I really enjoyed this exercise. We weren’t given much time (by design) to think through the best way to visually display the information in a meaningful way.
We were given data (responses) from three separate question prompts. At first, we thought about combining all three “buckets” and connect them along a theme. We so realized the separating the information from the prompt question left many of the answers out of context.
We decided to move forward and design a visualization system that best complimented the question prompt. For example, the above screenshot shows how we broke down each answer into themes. Some responses touched on numerous themes and this is shown based on the corresponding color square.
Overall, we learned that sometimes there’s not a one-sized fit all solution. We also learned the importance of looking for common informational themes to highlight as we tried to visualize the vast amount of information.
What news source(s) did you investigate and how are you initially perceiving their design approach?
The first three news sources that I investigated were the ones that I frequent the most. I visit many news sites. Some for school and work and others to keep up on current events. To be honest I have tended to avoid the news as of late, especially political news. Over the last several years I have come to realize that all news corporations, media websites, and journalists, in general, each have a particular basis based on their worldview and other factors. I get that. While some try to take a balanced approach, others lean and amplify their bias.
Out of the three sources, the one I probably visit most is NPR news. I’m also an avid radio listener. NPR also happens to be the only true news organization of the three I visit most. The other two, Google News and Twitter I would call news aggregators. Twitter is a bit different given the social media aspect. I like the idea of a news aggregator as it pulls top news from various outlets and from throughout the web. You can even set your preferences to have more of a curated experience. I don’t dare to guess the “secret sauce” behind what Google deems newsworthy, but somehow, it’s presented in a way that seems indifferent. It also shows the top story Given the political climate we find ourselves, I’m sure that someone would say these three examples are biased, and perhaps they are, but I find it reassuring that their bland disinterested UI screams impartial.
If you look at the above screenshots it’s telling how similar they are. The sans serif headline text is unemotional. If you look at the above screenshots, it’s telling how similar they are. The sans serif headline text is unemotional, clean, and purely informational. Coupled with each headline block is a simple AP photo. All three designs seem to say, “here’s the news you pick what matters most to you.”
The one thing I like about Google News is that it presents links to the same headline story so the user can compare different news coverage on the same topic, another design feature that reinforces their unbiased design approach.
For my next steps, I would like to explore two news sources with a clear record of bias and see if I can parse where they are trying to lead the user.
WEEK 1 — CLASS 2
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
What did you learn from today’s class discussions, activities, and readings and how do they impact your thinking of communication design?
Our class today started by doing a review of the previously created Miro board team projects (above). Teams were reassembled and were tasked to go through our Miro boards, make final tweaks, and present our process with the class. Our team discussed how and why we organized the information we were given. From the start, our team decided to work on each group of data collaboratively, which I found to give us richer ideas as we moved through different ways to organize the data.
It was interesting to see how other teams organized information. For the data that was more straightforward (such as the answers to “where are you from?”) that information was able to be displayed in a clear and orderly fashion.
The above figure clearly shows that the majority of students are from the USA with the second largest group coming from China, followed by Korea. For the USA data, it would be interesting to display the information in relation to where the students were coming from in the USA (left for California, right for NY).
We then moved to a discussion of the readings. We first discussed the Davis reading on schemas and then readings by Denise Gonzales Crisp on style. Psychologist Martha Augoustinos and Ian Walker describe schemas as a mental structure that contains general expectations and knowledge about people, social roles, events, and places. Overall, schemas are mental structures containing expectations based on your knowledge and past experiences.
“Design is part of a dynamic process through which culture is actually constructed.” — Penny Sparke
Illustrative role: Context is shaped by society design
Formative role: Context shapes society design
Stereotype: A type of role schema in which a number of traits are grouped in the mind and may be called forth by a single visual cue, such as skin color.
Prototype: best example
Denise Gonzales Crisp
- Role + Expression = Voice
- Denotation (is) + Connotation (signifies) = Attitude / Position
Lorraine Wild talks about how style inevitably cycles through a “great wheel” shown below.
Based on the class discussion and your deeper investigation of your news sources, how is your perception of their design approach and the roles that design plays evolving?
The two websites I decided to do a more thorough review of are The Blaze and Huffington Post (Huff Post). I was interested in seeing how a conservative (The Blaze) and a liberal (Huff Post) news organization might be talking to their audiences in similar or different ways.
Surprisingly, when both websites are placed side by side they look very similar in terms of visual layout. Both sites have a white or light grey background and use black to draw attention to their headlines. Both websites use a grid format with the majority of the headline content occupying the left two-thirds of the website.
After analyzing both of the websites the similarities started to fade away.
Almost all of the content on Huff Post linked to news articles while The Blaze really emphasized video content. The right column (1/3 of the website) is devoted to “exclusive video” content.
Words and phrases like “GREATEST MISTAKE,” “OWNS,” and “LYING” are in all caps to draw attention to the main point of the video.
Glenn Beck, is the creator of The Blaze is known as a radio and TV personality. This might be a clue as to why there is so much emphasis on video content.
While on the other hand, the Huff Post was cofounded by columnist, Arianna Huffington. Seeing so much video content might also be a clue to how The Blaze fans are seeking their news. Or maybe The Blaze is trying to cater to the 47 percent of Americans that prefer to watch or listen to their news rather than read it (Pew Research Center).
Other interesting groups of information exist on both websites. Huff Post has a ribbon at the very top of the website featuring various unrelated topics ranging from Coronavirus to shopping. This gives some insight into what their followers might be coming to the website for other than news.
Huff Post also has a video link at the top, but a video is not given any higher level of importance like The Blaze. The Blaze features four different ways to engage with their content; News, Radio, Podcasts, and BlazeTV. The next group of information is “featured stories” with one main story highlighted with the largest headline.
The Blaze website also uses the color red to move users down the page and alert them to key pieces of content like the “GET IMPORTANT NEWS” button for the newsletter sign up. Red is also the hover state for article headlines which seems to scream out to a user as they move down the page. The focus is clearly the main headline which is also promoting a “stunning” video.
Huff Post also uses a more subtle hover state to entice users to click. Both websites also share a love for extreme headline sizes. The Blaze’s main headline is a 45px sans serif bold font while Huff Post uses a 60px all caps sans serif font to grab the user's attention.
The focus and forms of contemporary news content seem to be on immediacy. All of the news sources I visited used bold headlines (alerts! and breaking!) with emotional headlines. The focus seems to be on grabbing the user’s immediate attention. In reference to Huff Post and The Blaze, the audience is clearly those who already fall into the liberal or conservative bucket. There does not seem to be a moderate or middle ground in the reporting. Both outlets merely reinforce the user's political opinions. What the users gain from seeing/reading these stories is only an affirmation of their current political beliefs.
Both news outlets are hoping that users will share the content that they find on their own social media platforms. When a user clicks on the social icons and pre-developed social post is only one click away from launching. The results of these actions are louder echo chambers with little or no independent analysis on the part of the user.
When the user clicks one of the social icons to share the article, the social post is pre-populated with a message that the user can easily share. Sometimes this is merely the headline or pull-quote from the article. The story screenshot above takes the headline from the story but does not put it in quotes, so it appears that the user wrote this tweet themselves.
Other times a sentence that seems to come from the user is pre-populating the social post. Also, external groups that are mentioned are tagged, rather than just mentioned. In this example, “@DemSocialist” is tagged which seems less impartial that just writing out the name “Democratic Socialists of America.”
As a responsible/ethical designer, what do you believe is important for viewers to consider/know?
As designers, we often focus on usability and ease of use. We try to make content easy for users to read. We divide content into chunks and create a hierarchy for the information we are looking for the user to grasps. We also make content easy for users to find and share. These can all be great and noble things. However, perhaps when it comes to certain information, like news, for example, we should be more discerning. How can we as ethical designers slow down the news, reinforce independent thought, deepen the critical analysis, and help bring down artificial walls that divide rather that connect?
WEEK 2 — CLASS 3
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Stacie started the class by talking about the Crisp reading and the below keywords and meanings.
Initiator: Who’s asking for information to be displayed?
Reader: Who’s the audience? Who are the readers? What assumptions are you making while thinking about the readers?
Artifact: What’s the writing and visual form?
Delivery: In what forms are things being delivered? Long or short? What times are things being delivered and what impact does that have?
The assumption that I am making about the readers of both news websites is that the readers are visiting the website to reaffirm (or even harden) their current point of view, not to broaden their perspective. Readers should know that these websites aim to get a response from the reader. Readers should also know that these websites are happy to tell you how you should feel about the story you are reading and they will even prepackage that feeling in a way you can share it. Lastly, readers should know that when they are sharing articles on behalf of the initiator they are trading on their own good name.
PROJECT 1
Our goal is to investigate ways of using communication design to intervene in existing forms of news consumption to help people become better-informed citizens by:
1.) aiding their critical review of information
2.) teaching them how to carefully read content (not just the words but the forms of content)
WEEK 2 — CLASS 4
Tuesday, September 10, 2020
What’s with the news anyway?
· We read the news to be informed
· We share news to inform others (or to signal to others that we’re informed)
We know that the rise of social media has changed the information landscape drastically. This includes the way we consume news. In fact, according to a 2019 Pew Research study, social media is now one of the most popular ways in which people, especially young adults, get their political news. It also states that “Americans who mainly get their news on social media are less engaged and less knowledgeable.”
In my review of news sites over the last week, I’ve found that much of my news was packaged neatly for me to share on social media. The pre-populated tweets seemed to purposely come off as opinions created by me, the reader.
So why is this information valuable and more importantly why should we care?
Well, trust in the news media is at an almost unprecedented (2016!) low, differing drastically among political lines with democrats having more trust in mass media than republicans. Only 41 percent of Americans say they trust mass media according to a 2019 Gallup report.
- 13% trust the media “a great deal,” and 28% “a fair amount”
- 69% of Democrats, 15% of Republicans, 36% of independents trust media
News corporations are hoping that readers will use our good names, reputations, and peer influence to share news on their behalf.
This is Dita. Dita gets most of her news from social media.
This is Dita’s friend Sid. Dita trust’s Sid. Sid is smart, well-informed, and seems to be up to speed on current events based on his social feed.
Sid likes to share news on social to inform others and signal that he’s well-informed.
However, Sid is unaware that the initiator of the news he is sharing is trying to get the reader to share exaggerated, untrue, or bias information as if it came from Sid, who people trust for good information.
When Sid goes to share the news story on social, the post is prepopulated with content, which makes it super convenient to share, so Sid simply submits his post.
Dita sees the shocking post and Sid’s outrage and also shares the story to inform others.
However, Dita’s mother sees the post and recognizes it as not true and comments. Dita fact checks the article and is embarrassed. She deletes the post and loses trust in Sid’s judgment.
Overview
· Only 41 percent of Americans say they trust Mass Media.
· Social media is now the number one way young Americans consume news.
· Mass Media organizations are keenly aware of both of these facts.
· That’s why they are hoping you will share their news for them.
· Using your good name, reputation, and peer influence.
We all want to be informed and inform others. We know that sharing misinformation is easier than ever. How make good sharing decisions to protect our good name?
Live napkin sketching
I really enjoyed doing live napkin sketching in class. Some of the pain-points were using the iPad and Apple Pencil to sketch in Zoom. The pencil has a delay which was a bit distracting and made me second guess if the sketch was being delivered. Also, I wish I was able to quickly change the pencil line width on the fly like real sketching. This would have been helpful while trying to emphasize key points during the sketch. The third pain-point was the time constraint. I do think that the 3-minute time limit was a good amount of time as a participant, but as the presenter, it went by quickly.
I really enjoyed my classmates' presentations. Two presenters that stood out to me for their presentation style, delivery, and sketch style were Karen and Catherine. Both Karen and Catherine stayed within the limit constraint and developed a smooth flow that allowed the audience to fully understand their concepts.
WEEK 3 — CLASS 5
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Today, I participated in my very first design jam!
My group consisted of Karen, Yueru, and myself. All three of us were interested in exploring the idea of trust and transparency in the media. We explored the idea of whether our intervention should try to restore the faith and trust in the media corporation, or give users more information that would allow them to be better informed about the article they are reading. We also talked about creating an intervention that forced the user to do a critical review of the information and informed them about the information that they were about to share. We decided to help users make better sharing decisions, which in turn would help spotlight trust issues in the media, which hopefully would force media organizations to become more accountable.
Main ideas:
- Focus on how we share news
- The level of trust depends on the person sharing the news (our social networks)
Potential interventions:
- The user goes to share an article on social media and is then notified by the intervention that the article is misleading, or was reported to be heavily biased, which gives the user time to question whether to share it or not.
- The user goes to share the article and is presented with three alternative articles about the same subject to read in order to see the whole picture and perhaps broaden their perspective.
- When the user goes to share an article on media with a pre-populated message they are notified that they are about to share the news corporation's point of view and are prompted to change the message and add their own perspective in their own voice.
- When the user goes to share the article they are presented with the tone of the message they are about to say as well as a spectrum of political bias indicator.
- While reading the article the user is told about what is missing from the article and where they can find that information. They are also made aware of the political bias of news sources, history of the news organization, and author notes, in order to help the user broaden their perspective and be better-informed citizens.
WEEK 3 — CLASS 6
Thursday, September 15, 2020
Today we finished reviewing the design jams from the groups that did not have a chance to present last week. We then reviewed the Kevin Lynch reading an excerpt from his book called, The Image of the City. In this book, Lynch discusses his work studying the cities of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles and how observers take in the information of the city and use it to make mental maps.
“A city is ever-changing in detail.” — Kevin Lynch
Stacie asked us to think about our interventions in terms of how people will enter into them. Some questions to consider are; What’s the entry point? How are you going to structure your design to help people identify the patterns (parts that comprise it)?
We then went over key definitions from the reading.
Legibility — It will concentrate especially on one particular visual quality: the apparent clarity or “legibility” of the cityscape. By this, we mean the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern
Imageability — The qualities that comprise the artifact. This leads to the definition of what might be called imageability: that quality in a physical object ·which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment.
Paths — “Path s are the channel s along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves.”
Node — “Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling.” Something you can move into. The point was intersections meet. A building or a park. It’s something that we enter into. Examples: comment sections, paragraphs,
Landmarks — Are a point a reference. “Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case, the observer doe s not enter within them, they are external.” Example: The Fence, flagpole, etc. spots of color, anchors on a page.
Districts — “District s are the medium-to-large sections of the city, conceived of a shaving two-dimensional extent, which the observer mentally enters “inside of, “ and which are recognized as having some common, identifying character.”
Edges — “Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer. They are the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls.”
WEEK 4 — CLASS 7
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Today, I met with my group to talk about Project 1 and to start refining our possible intervention. We met before class and Stacie gave us time during class to work through our research and to start to refine our intervention.
Our intervention is coming along quite well. We narrowed our focus on how users share the news. Our general assumption is that users that share news care what their followers think of them. They are sharing news to signal that they are informed (or to show their stance on an issue) or to inform others about a topic (or persuade them). In both cases trust is key. The user sharing the news wants to be considered reliable and trustworthy. The level of trust is really dependent on the person sharing the news (via social networks).
Our intervention is a tool that can help the user be conscious of their own bias and think critically about the content that they are reading and possibly sharing. Our intervention is meant to create a moment of pause/mindfulness. We want the user to think before they share and provide them with in-the-moment resources for them to broaden their understanding of a topic. It’s ok if the user becomes uncomfortable since our goal is to push back against the immediacy of news in order to advance the accuracy and accountability of the content being shared. The main objective of the intervention is to increase (or broaden) the user’s perspective.
Key points from the class building up to Project 1
- Deconstructed existing forms of communication to identify similarities and differences between news sources. We also worked to decode the structures that shape the news.
- Used sketching as a way of finding clarity.
- Sketching for inward and outward analysis.
- Design jam to quickly prototype.
- Building new mental models of design.
- The connection between denotation and connotation. What role does form play in conveying meaning?
- We evaluated information hierarchy and visual elements.
- Understanding how to work with others
WEEK 4 — CLASS 8
Thursday, September 25, 2020
- Focus on how we share news
- The level of trust depends on the person sharing the news (our social networks)
- Helping user be conscious/critical about the content they are reading and sharing
- Create a moment of pause/mindfulness
- Good to be uncomfortable
- Fighting against the immediacy of news
- Promote accuracy and accountability
- Increase perspective (integrity) / depth of understanding (if we suggest related articles)
- Promote comparison between new resources
- Culture shift in how news is shared / what news people are reading
WEEK 5 — CLASS 9
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Today we presented our final project. Our intervention was called CheckYourSelf.
CheckYourself intervention
Our intervention is called CheckYourself. CheckYourself is an online tool that informs the user about their own bias and also gives them more reliable information about the news that they are reading and/or sharing. Our intervention is designed to enable users to think critically about the content that they are consuming and sharing. This intervention is meant to create a moment of pause to give the user time to reflect. The goal is to have the user think critically about the information before they share it more broadly. A key component of this intervention is the ability to provide the user with in-the-moment resources that allows them to broaden their understanding of a topic.
Project overview
We were tasked with investigating a wide range of news sources to better understand how they present information and what the creators’ motivations might be.
We looked into seven contemporary news sources: The Blaze, .coda, Fox News, The Guardian, HuffPost, Mother Jones, and PBS News Hour.
Here you can see the news sources we studied presented on a politically spectrum from left leaning to right leaning viewpoints and content.
We analyzed their structure, form, and content and uncovered inherent patterns and relationships among the sources.
Our team was particularly interested in bias and the lack of transparency and trust in mass media.
According to 2019 Gallup report only 41% of Americans say that they trust mass media.
Trust by pollical party affiliation is also low, with only 69% of Democrats, 15% of Republicans, and 36% of independents saying that they trust mass media.
According to a 2019 Pew Research study, social media is now one of the most popular ways in which people, especially young adults, get their political news. It also states that “Americans who mainly get their news on social media are less engaged and less knowledgeable.”
We found this to be a perfect storm for misinformation and false news to thrive.
News organizations seem to know these two facts and are hoping users will share content on their behalf. Many users us social media platforms as news aggregators, trusting that their friends did their due diligence, checked for sources, and by virtue are a more reliable information filter.
But what if you don’t know that your sharing misinformation?
Key questions should be asked when a user is looking at news information:
· Who funds the website?
· How does it emphasize the importance of a piece of news?
· What elements does it emphasize in a piece of news?
· What are the different wordings used by different news organizations when comparing the same report?
· Do they use an objective narrative tone or are they constantly emphasizing some points of view?
When analyzing the news websites, we would a common design feature was immediacy. News site also were fast to get users to share content. And when they did, prepopulated next was commonplace.
So, we decided to create an intervention that not only help stop the spread of misinformation, but also educated users about the bias and accuracy of the news they were reading within their own bubble. The overarching goal was to create better informed citizens.
You can see the full project here: https://medium.com/checkyourself/
In conclusion
I really enjoyed the topic of this project. It was nice seeing all of the interventions that other teams created. I learned a lot about how current trends in media and media consumption. I learned analyze complex information and see (and understand) the visualize relationships between content that might be imperceptible, but of major importance. I learned to ask probing questions about what is visible and/or invisible and why. I also learned about more about working with teams in various time zones remotely.
I know that I will use these observation skills in the future when analyzing my own designs or the work that is presented to me. Question like, “Am I unintentionally creating an unintended user interaction?” or “Why am I being presented with this information in this form” will come into play. As I start the ideation process of future designs, I want to design information in a way that requires the viewer to pause and reflect. In this case the acquired skills and knowledge would be very useful. These skills are all very important to have as a designer, but also as a well-informed citizen, and I’m sure will use them in the very near future.
