Task
A open-ended Design Challenge from IBM utilizing the Watson technology: "Conceptualize an experience for browsing the news, but not in a traditional way (or the way it has been done in the last 100 years) but rather a new way that offers greater insight, worthy of the new era of cognitive computing."
Design the experience for a 84" 4k touch screen
Approach
I explored what “news” and “information” would mean in a cognitive era to address how to improve the signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to ingesting information. Watson was designed as a “pull” interaction, to return answers to a given query, but we typically experience news as a “push” experience. Thus, one of the goals in my experience design is to approach a visual and verbal conversation cycle that encompasses both push and pull elements that allow the user to dive into news and information topics at multiple levels of granularity.
Another concept I explored was Watson’s capability to help users construct and navigate complex, ongoing news narratives, which in the current news browsing system requires the user to wade through high volumes of noise to piece together an asynchronous narrative, sometimes not relevant to their level of understanding about the topic.
This begins to approach the natural way a child learns, which is by continually asking questions while having the ability to be exposed to new pathways of information that the user didn’t know that they didn’t know about.
Tools
I was asked for conceptual renders, so I used hand drawings to brainstorm, then Illustrator and Photoshop to mock-up how the application would look visually
