Knight Lab Studio is an interdisciplinary class where Northwestern students, faculty, and professional staff work together at the intersection of storytelling, design, and technology: all media and platforms are fair game. As we work on these problems, we produce cutting-edge digital work, research, and thought — innovating across every part of the media-making process.
Our process combines user and audience research, design thinking, critical and analytical work, iterative building, storytelling, new technology, and a healthy dose of experimentation--often within the confines of a single, specific problem.
Applications for the Spring 2024 Studio class are closed. We can let you know when we announce the next round of projects!
Join Us
Build new tools and tell new stories.
Each quarter, we pull together multidisciplinary teams of Northwestern students, faculty, and professionals to collaborate on projects we believe are important for the future of media. That could mean everything from making obscure data more available to journalists to solving questions around how to best navigate space in virtual reality. The Lab places students at the center of these important problems for 10 weeks. We work together to identify problems and to find solutions.
The class is a team-based, cooperative lab experience for students who want to create and explore new tools, stories, story forms, and physical devices.
Our most successful students are driven and motivated; they possess the curiosity and determination to drive and sustain a project from start to finish. They are comfortable with ambiguity, and have a strong desire to identify lines of questioning and paths to find the answers. We expect students to spend at least six hours a week on the project outside of class times. Synthesizing the work you do and communicating it clearly to your teammates and to the instructional team will be crucial; you should expect to spend a portion of each week doing this.
The class is cross-listed as JOUR 342 and EECS 397/497. For Spring, it meets Tues/Thurs, 2:00-3:50pm.
Applications for Spring 2024 are closed.
Questions?
Reach out to professor Zach Wise. Want to stay in the loop? We can let you know when we announce the next round of projects!
Frequently asked questions
-
When are Applications Due?
Applications are due by February 16th at 9AM. -
When will I know if I got in?
Students will know if they are accepted before Northwestern registration opens. Typically we contact students 1-2 days after the deadline (February 16th at 9AM). -
When is the class held?
Tues/Thurs, 2:00-3:50pm -
What does this count for?
You can take this course for JOUR 342 and EECS 397/497 credit. -
I’m not sure I’m technical enough.
Some, but not all, of our projects require technical know-how. And all of our projects have important non-technical roles. -
I applied last time but didn’t get in.
Ugh, that sucks. But we’d love for you to try again! We admire tenacity, and a new round of projects requires a new round of people. -
How long is your application?
It’s low-key and takes about 8 minutes to fill out. -
How do I apply?
The link to the application is on each project page. Below is a link to the application, just make sure you read the project descriptions first.
Apply to a Project
Project Results
Prototypes, research, guides and presentations from projects that have run in the Knight Lab Studio.
Product > Journalism AI Readiness Scorecard
AI, Automation, and Newsrooms: Finding Fitting Tools for Your Organization
If you’d like to use technology to make your newsroom more efficient, you’ve come to the right place. Tools exist that can help you find...
Mixed Reality > Augmented Reality Features with 3D Food Photography
Building AR Journalism Experiences to Educate and Inform
In Spring of 2020, one of the Knight Lab Studio teams focused on exploring how Augmented Reality can be used to create experiences and tools...
Product > Storytelling with GIFs
Exploring and Understanding the Storytelling Potential of GIFs How GIFs are used across different platforms
From memes to animated data visualizations, GIFs have become a staple in the way we communicate digitally to express ideas, feelings, and concepts. GIFs are...
Mixed Reality > Information Spaces in AR/VR
Designing Information Spaces for Augmented Reality
In the winter quarter of 2019, our team explored how Augmented Reality can benefit different types of journalism. Over the course of the class, we built...
Mixed Reality > Resurrecting History for VR
Transforming Stereographs into Point Clouds
Virtual and augmented reality, though often used for gaming purposes, may be turned to a more academic or journalistic purpose. Throughout the fall, we explored...
The Hammer Without A Nail Oscillations is a New Art Form Making Meaningful Impact
Imagine a classroom of elementary-aged students. They appear to be sitting cross-legged on the floor or walking around the room, but in reality, they’re dancing....
Context Without Clutter
Unlike literature, articles are scarcely allowed to fully flesh out the worlds that they exist in. Brevity and intentionality are often required to keep audiences...
Prototyping Spatial Audio for Movement Art
One of Oscillations’ technical goals for this quarter’s Knight Lab Studio class was an exploration of spatial audio. Spatial audio is sound that exists in...
Comparing Motion Capture Techniques for Movement Art
With Oscillations’ connection to the movement arts, it made sense to experiment with existing motion capture technology to find accurate, consistent, and scalable ways to...
Oscillations Audience Engagement Research Findings
During the Winter 2018 quarter, the Oscillations Knight Lab team was tasked in exploring the question: what constitutes an engaging live movement arts performance for...
Product > Automated Fact Checking
How to translate live-spoken human words into computer "truth"
Our Knight Lab team spent three months in Winter 2018 exploring how to combine various technologies to capture, interpret, and fact check live broadcasts from...
Projects
Projects that have run in the Knight Lab Studio.
Upcoming Projects
Knight Lab Studio projects running in Spring 2024.
AI Art Generation for Journalism
Tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are shaking up the art world in large part because they are accessible for almost anyone to use. The limits of what they can create is still being tested. Many journalism articles lack visuals which are essential in today's platform centric media landscape. A tool to automagically generate art for many of those articles could help smaller newsrooms without a budget for visuals (art/photography).
AI Editorial Model Training
Tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are shaking up the art world in large part because they are accessible for almost anyone to use. The limits of what they can create is still being tested. Many journalism articles lack visuals which are essential in today's platform centric media landscape. We have several projects that utilize AI art for journalism but the trained model is problematic. This project builds on previous quarter's work of training an editorial model that minimizes stereotypes, sexism and racism for editorial use.
Exploring AI-Powered Local Newsrooms
Generative AI is transforming all kinds of industries, including local news. Newsrooms need to know what tools to trust, how best to use them, and what they might cost. Automation can aid writers, create images, detect patterns in data, identify potential news events, promote content, convert articles to email newsletters and much more. Local news needs a playbook for automation.
What's next for Social Media?
After many years of flying high, public sentiment around social media in general, and specifically around certain platforms has turned sour. A 2020 Pew Research Survey found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in this country. In a recent article on the Columbia Journalism Review, Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen wrote “When Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last year, journalists around the world looked on in alarm,” and those fears earned credence weeks later when Musk banned journalists who criticized him from Twitter.
Design Research
Inspiration and Ideation
Auditing the NewsEvaluating News Quality on Smart Speakers
Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana—smart speakers and agents are now used by about 20% of US homes. People use them to ask about weather, set timers, play games, get information, or listen to the news. But are these devices delivering high-quality news and information or could they be misinforming and sharing “junk” news? This project aims to find out. By developing an audit method that defines what queries to audit and systematically collects data on the results over time for those queries from several different smart speakers, the project will allow for an assessment and comparison of news quality from these different devices.
Civic Engagement with City Bureau
As local news organizations shrink, many civic advocates fear that no one will be monitoring the day-to-day processes that make city governments run. As part of their innovative approach to closing news gaps and promoting civic engagement, Chicago’s City Bureau has developed their “Documenters” program to train citizens to observe and record public meetings. As they develop this team of citizen journalists, they are now considering the complementary question: what is the most effective way to make the work they produce available and useful to Chicagoans?
For this project, the Northwestern student team will conduct design research and prototyping to explore solutions. Students will be expected to be in close contact with City Bureau’s team, with current documenters, and with engaged citizens who want to stay informed about what’s happening at the heart of these civic processes. Students should be prepared to go out into Chicago to meet with these people face to face for interviews, observations, and prototype testing.
ProPublica Illinois
Students will design, develop, prototype and test one tool for community engagement, with a likely focus on the listening and information gathering stage.
Mixed Reality
Virtual, Augmented... It's all Reality
Augmented Reality Visualizations
An experimental design project that explores visualizing data in three dimensions for augmented reality. Visualizations that can be examined and inspected by physically getting closer or understood by walking around them, open up exciting possibilities for how we communicate complex ideas and data that reveals hidden truths.
Exploring Data Visualization in VR
An experimental design project, in which we students are analyzing methods for communicating data visually and exploring how those principles might be transferred and transformed in a 360 environment.
Photojournalism in 3D for VR and Beyond
In this project, students will use modern approaches to making 3D images both with hardware and software processing.
Product
Our most solution-oriented projects.
Creative Co-Author
Creative Co-author is a creative writing enhancement tool that focuses primarily on pounding out the first draft. It is type-ahead cranked up to eleven. It types ahead, lurks behind, and generally peers over your shoulder while you pound out words in a speed-draft writing reverie.
Storytelling with GIFsFacilitate simple visual social sharing.
This project will build upon prototypes and research conducted in the Fall 2019 Studio class, but participation is open to any interested student. As the open-web continues to die, storytellers need tools that help them create sharable artifacts suitable for a variety of social networks and platforms. Brevity and portability are of the utmost importance. This project is concerned with designing a tool that allows novice storytellers to create simple 5 frame (5 images) GIFS that when combined with text for the post, are sharable on a variety of platforms and social networks. This iteration of the project will be focused on UX and UI design and building a sustainable application for the creation of visual stories saved in the GIF file format.
Storyline: Charts that tell stories.
One of the most common problems we see in data storytelling is how and when to introduce an editorial layer onto a visualization. Mobile devices afford us very little real estate to work with, and interactivity must be limited. But without a “story” layer, users are left without the context to understand what events might impact or inform a trend. They see something going up or down but don’t see why. “Storyline” will be a tool for creating stories around line graphs.
Sensors
Using sensors to collect information about our environment.
Environmental Reporting with Sensors
Sensor journalism uses sensors to collect information about our environment. It opens new possibilities for journalists enabling them to collect and process data that might not be available or at a level of detail not previously available.
Privacy Mirror
The average person today that has a smartphone, walks around leaking information about themselves over radio signals. WiFi, bluetooth and NFC radiate personal information into the public airwaves. These signals can tell you a lot about a person without their knowledge. To raise awareness around privacy and security for digital devices, this project will seek to create a “mirror” that reflects back information that is radiating out from anyone who stands in front of it. Frequencies include: RFID cell phones, WiFi, bluetooth, Misc RF at 900Mhz 2.4Ghz 5Ghz
SensorGrid API and Dashboard
SensorGrid is Knight Lab's experimental prototype environmental sensor wireless network system. This project will focus on the design and development of the web API and user dashboard for SensorGrid data management and presentation.