Our Design Research projects often start from a conversation with an organization who becomes our partner for the class. We identify a challenge they face and put a team of students on the task of identifying the key stakeholders around the challenge, understanding their needs, and prototyping prospective solutions. If you’d like to start a conversation, drop us a line.
Audience Engagement and Onboarding with Hearken
Students are working closely with the team at Hearken, and are gaining valuable insights into how important audience engagement is to our media landscape.
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.
Cape to CairoCurating a Transcontinental Collection
In 1953, Lydia Luhman Pederson, a resident of Caledonia, Illinois, traveled from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo.
Along her transcontinental journey, Pederson shot movies, crafted a photo album scrapbook, and collected one-of-a-kind objects that are currently housed in the Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University. The Herskovits Library seeks to create a digital exhibition integrating emerging and engaging technologies to animate these objects and media.
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.
Crowdsourcing for JournalismMany hands make short work, crowdsourcing document interpretation
Many important news stories are buried amidst huge numbers of documents. And sometimes, those documents are hard for news organizations to process, either because of the sheer number, or the formats in which the documents are published.
Da Concierge!Developing a chatbot to support Chicago tourism
Chicago is a big city. And for many visitors, Chicago is the big city. Whether it’s for work or pleasure, when visitors travel to Chicago it means figuring out how to experience a city that’s both large and diverse. That can make it challenging for visitors to discover and enjoy all of Chicago’s unique neighborhoods and experiences. For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will partner with Choose Chicago (the official destination marketing organization for Chicago) to develop and deliver a conversational A.I. (“chatbot”) with a distinct and memorable personality that helps visitors find and experience more of Chicago.
Speed Reading RobotsPowering up City Bureau's Documenters Program
Local governments hold a lot of meetings which are meant to allow the public to observe and comment on policy and legislation. But local news organizations are cutting back and often can’t cover them. Chicago’s City Bureau has developed a program called Documenters, which trains citizens and pays them to cover those meetings. Along the way, they have developed software which grabs not just the schedule of these meetings but the agendas, handouts, and other documents -- documents which may have important information about future plans and laws, but which usually go unread.
Historical Census Data
Census Reporter is a tool that helps journalists find and understand data from the US Census American Community Survey (ACS), making that data much more easily accessible and digestible. However, it only presents data from the most recent ACS releases.
Journalism and Democracy AppliedProviding context to government and politics reporting
Many newsrooms crank out a steady flow of government and politics stories. Behind the daily stories is a lot of history and context. How might newsrooms better organize their publishing to provide this background information? How should that background information be organized to support the casual audience who is trying to catch up? How should it be organized to serve the “political junkies” who want to see how all of the pieces connect?
Journalism and Democracy beyond the ElectionWhat comes next?
After what seems like a never-ending election season, many folks are ready to think about anything else. On the other hand, millions of people are activated and ready to be more civically engaged. Traditional journalistic work mostly proceeds as though there’s nothing to do until the next time the polls open, but is that all there is? Meanwhile, activist organizations and social media users often don’t worry so much about facts and fairness. For this Knight Lab Studio project, we’ll conduct a broad design research study, looking for “civic media” opportunities which adapt and evolve journalism’s traditional role in supporting democratic society in light of how information systems really work today.
LATINEXTHighlighting Chicago’s Rising Latinx Voices
The Chicago Reporter and Univision Chicago have teamed up to create LATINEXT: a first-of-its-kind cross-platform news team to engage and address the information needs of the 2.1 million strong Latinx community in the Chicago region. This project is radically rethinking the relationship between the newsroom and the audience, “putting the service back in public service journalism.” For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will: conduct design research about the needs of this audience; help LATINEXT prepare to responsibly involve the community in the journalism process; and, propose a near-term roadmap for developing the project further.
Measuring Influence & Impact
The world is drowning in content. On Wordpress alone, 70 million posts are published per month. In an ocean of noise, how can you tell which ideas really resonate?
Metaverse Media
A year ago, the word “metaverse” was just a concept from a classic Science Fiction novel, but since then, it has leapt into the public conversation. But what does “metaverse” really mean? And how might the metaverse (or some metaverses) impact, or provide opportunities for journalism?
New to TownRethinking News Audience Needs
When people move to a new community, they have a million questions about their new home. Meanwhile, news organizations serving that community have an interest in “meeting” those new people and converting them into subscribers. The Indianpolis (“Indy”) Star, one of Medill’s Local News Initiative partners has identified this as an opportunity in their coverage area. This project provides the opportunity to work on a real challenge in media innovation and product development. Students will research the needs of newcomers to the Indianapolis metro area and prototype a service to meet those needs. This work will be done in consultation with the Indy Star, with a goal of designing an experiment for them to execute later this year.
Open Data Reporter
“Open data" might be a buzzword, but there are still significant obstacles to taking advantage of valuable datasets. They can be hard to find, hard to clean, and hard to manage. Human-centered design and a little coding energy can make it substantially easier for people to find stories and explore data. This team will approach a high-value public data set and aim to make the data more usable.
The Partisanship Detector
Do the words journalists choose reveal unconscious political biases or create/reinforce similar biases? The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections made vicious and fierce rhetoric the norm and strong political identification a fact of life. The accusations of “fake news” and bias ring loudly, destroying the perception of a free and fair press and posing a threat to democracy. The challenge for this project is to develop a human-centered process and natural language processing tools to help journalists make less freighted word choices; that is, a detector for partisan language when covering political news.
Podcast Discoverability
The podcasting landscape is overcrowded, with larger voices from legacy broadcast media sometimes drowning out new entrants. Browsing for new-to-you, quality podcasts is hard, with shows scattered across distribution platforms. This team will explore how we might provide users a better path to discovering new podcasts.
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.
Rethinking Election Coverage
In the popular imagination of American democracy, the press informs voters so that they can make the best choice at the polls. However, many citizens feel as though that contract has been broken. People are frustrated with “horse-race coverage” of elections—that is, journalism focused more on who is “electable”, who is “winning” and the mechanics of campaigning than on policy and helping voters make the best choice. Rather than seeking a technology-first solution, this project proposes to begin with Jay Rosen’s suggestion that journalists ask "what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?" and work to make the coverage about that.
SidebarContext without Clutter
Publishing a story requires a constant balancing act: you have to get to your point, but you don’t always know whether your audience is fully up-to-speed on the content. Or maybe in your research you found some really fascinating information, but you have to admit it’s kind of a distraction from your main point. The web was developed on the promise of linking between documents, but too often a simple link fails -- it doesn’t give the reader much sense of what sort of information is at the end of the link, and it runs the risk of sending your audience off down a rabbit hole, never to return to your work.
Smarter News
How might we better understand how to reach our audience, delivering the right news at the right moment, or for the right mood, or for the right amount of time?
Travellers’ TalesRe-imagining Travel Journalism
While quarantine has had most of us pretty home-bound, there’s no reason we can’t look ahead to the future. Travel journalism has always played a role in helping people learn about places to visit and prepare their journeys, but does it really “work” as well for the audience as it could? In this project, we’ll consider what people really need from travel journalism and how it could be made more useful for its audience.
Visual Recipes
Cooking often seems harder than it really is. The literature doesn't seem to help us here either. A lot of modern cooking instruction seems to be written in an overly-narrative style, often emphasizing prose aesthetics as much as practical instruction. Obscure techniques and exotic ingredients can leave one to wonder, what is essential to a recipe? What must be replicated and what can be simplified?
Writing and Designing for Chatbots
Students will examine conversational user interfaces—that’s to say, using chat as a medium to interact with a bot.
Design Research in Youth MediaExploring opportunities for local news
As local news sources dwindle there is one group of reporters in every community that continue to keep journalism alive: high school students. High School news and newspapers are the only source of news in many news deserts. They are also important for education in media literacy and the first exposure many people have to what journalism is. Many high school publications rely on free repurposed systems and content management systems to publish their work. They are often presented in forms that are different from their peers' typical media habits. There's an opportunity here to make high school journalism more relevant to not only youth in schools but also to their parents and communities.