March 7 to March 10, 2022
Partners: Effy, Faiza, Jacob, Mita, Applied Works
Brief: Design an experience that communicates the importance of fighting misinformation.
Weaving
We then turned in the direction of weaving. With weaving, we could give participants different colored threads to trace their information pathways. With the colored threads, we hoped that it would be less monolithic or homogenous than the clay experiment.
During our tutorial with John and Al, they noted that we could go down two routes:
a) additive/accumulative - snowball effect of misinformation
b) interrelatedness/entanglement - weaving together of information pathways
Rather than sit and think about which one was better, we decided to try out the different routes. We first started with weaving.
Holding different colored threads, we went around the table and took turns saying statements about Covid that could either be true, false, or slightly true. If anyone agreed with the statement, they would take a piece of thread from the person who said the statement.
Analysis
However, I believe we needed a more complex way to represent the chain of misinformation. How would we account for people changing their opinions? Or for people who were not 100% in agreement but still found the information compelling?
There is also an exponential effect. We would have to involve people at different scales, such as 5 people in the first, 10 people in the second, 50 in the third, and so on.
In other words, how would we account for gradations and nuances in the consumption of misinformation?
With this ribbon design, we would create running headlines with true or false headlines about Covid-19. Participants would each have a separate ribbon and read the headlines. As they walked along the headlines, they would loop the thread around a series of poles whenever they changed directions. Eventually the ribbons would cross over one another and create a wider web.
Analysis
With this design, we had to be very intentional about why the participant would change direction around the pole. What would spur them to change direction? And what does this looping around the pole symbolize? Otherwise it would not indicate anything, other than the person's random decision to change direction.
Although we discussed this, everyone was quite tired from the five week stint and left this idea without fleshing it out more deeply.
Feedback
After the presentation, Marco from Applied Works said that he liked how we designed a nonlinear visual representation of the participants' information pathways. He also said the design could be used in other ways, such as collecting data on how people interact with information.
Other feedback we received was that the design needed to be more polished. What would a digital format of this look like? And how could we make the design more compelling for the spectators?
Lara wanted to see more clearly the relationship between the misinformation and the network, which went back to the looping issue. Why did the participants change direction with their ribbons? How could we better show the ambiguity of the decision-making process?
Others also said that they felt our design was missing a conclusion.
Key Takeaways
Negotiating ideas took the most effort and time within our group. We were lucky because everyone in the group wanted to do their best. At the same time, this meant that people felt very passionately about certain ideas and it always took lots of effort to convince certain people of a direction to head in.
I am not sure if I agree with splitting the group into smaller groups before we agree on a concept. It seems that this had a detrimental effect on our communication. The smaller groups would each head in separate directions and it became difficult to find a common point at the end. Although division of labor is fine with making the actual design, in terms of conceptual grounding, I think it works better if we stick together as a cohesive whole.
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