For this weeks tutorial I came up with the symbol for this project. It draws back on the songlines beginnings and is an adaption to the aboriginal symbol for meeting place. Although I am still without a name for this project, I am happy to have a symbol to represent what this project is about.
Last week's feedback brought in some very relevant points to my project. This week, I looked to address those design problems directly.
The first of the questions was how do people find out about this app, and how do they interact with it in a physical sense. After much deliberation over having something physical that would trigger a story to play or send your phone a message, I decided to go for a much more subtle approach. This had a few reasons that underpinned this. For one, I wanted this to be a non-aggressive approach to this problem. I thought if people are forced to listen to these stories they won't have much effect on them. To make real change of values and beliefs, you need to be in a state of curiosity and openness. I believe you have to have the idea that this happened by "chance" from your own discovery and not the motive of some external body. For that reason, I am suggesting to mark the physical location of a story with a tile with a symbol on it. My theory is, that if enough of these symbols are placed around, people will start to become curious as to what they are for. Once this sense of curiosity is ignited, they will be more emotionally attached when they hear the story as they have invested time in finding out what the symbols mean.
The next big question I had to ask was did I want this to be edited or raw, or at least what percent of each would be suitable. There is a strong motivation to go with a quite raw format, as there is something incredibly emotionally attaching to this kind of storytelling device. I think though as well, some level of audio mastering needs to be given to the story just to drop the background noise down and make sure the speakers voice is audible and clear enough to understand. In the end, these are going to have to be listened to outside most likely, through a phone or other simple device so this mastering I believe is essential. Saying this however, I think some presence of the time and place they recorded the story will still be there in the clip, as these aspects are vital to their story and maintaining some sense of rawness to the audio.
The upload process: More or less as described in this diagram. I think the important points to note are the use of curators in filtering the content which goes up. Firstly, I believe the real need for filtering on this project. I don't want it really turning out like a geo based youtube, and therefore I believe it is necessary to keep in mind the goals of the project and maintaining integrity throughout. I also considered post public upload moderation, where users can flag videos as inappropriate or offensive, however, once again, this comes down to maintaining the integrity of the project and I fear that it could be lost if this were the filtering process.
This is the interface as described in detail in this earlier post. I wanted the interface to be a simple mapping software that displays a satellite image that has been slightly distorted to show a dreamscape almost. My thinking behind this was that I am creating a a map of stories, not of physical locations, and therefore that surreal experience should come through in the display of the app.
This is the beginning draft of my keywork filter matching system. Basically it is an automated system which looks at counteracting negative, one sided media, with the other side of the story (the perspective of someone from that culture, or country, or religion, who has uploaded a story to this program) This will only happen when there are 2 or more accessible stories (such as the slide above) but will be similar to the hits system on google, ie what comes up first. So the point of this if there was a lot of negative media coverage about afghanistan for example, a story from an afghani would come up first in order to understand their viewpoint and experiences and not be stereotyped by the media.
This project which can be found more about in this post.
Overall, this week has been a big one in decided some actual design decisions. Robert seemed happy with my progress however raised some more questions about the curation which I will endeavour to look at over the next week.
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