nynnestorm11216-blog

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Final project

My project is a newsletter for Danes living outside of Denmark which should be sent to them in the time leading up to a Danish election to make it easier to get an overview and make it easy to vote by post. The newsletter will take shape after the type of election, regional, general or EU, but they will have many of the same elements: why vote, how to vote, voter tests and relatively simple content about the election and the candidates as video, podcast and articles. The idea is that the newsletter should make it simple and quick to get a sense of what is going on at home, so it does not feel as overwhelming and time demanding to have to sort the enormous amounts of content produced during every election – especially when as someone living abroad who already has to follow the news of the country they live in and their homeland. It could be interesting to apply the idea to other countries and their expats, especially in cases where the homeland's news are very different from international coverage of the elections, so the newsletter would have to balance informing the readers but without spreading propaganda. Newsletter for regional elections: https://us17.admin.mailchimp.com/templates/share?id=85806245_18859716f1d7ba6548b8_us17 Newsletter for general elections: https://us17.admin.mailchimp.com/templates/share?id=85806245_9f2b7f0b5a2d33be2db7_us17 Newsletter for EU elections: https://us17.admin.mailchimp.com/templates/share?id=85806245_73a9c7f57a392a2d6610_us17

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Idea: to make it easier for Danes living abroad to vote for elections in Denmark. Example: The Danish municipality and regional election Through Facebook Messenger and a Thanksgiving dinner, I’ve talked to 16 Danes about their experience of voting or not voting at the recent Danish municipality and regional election. About half of them are academics and the other half work as chefs. Everyone, except one (who only votes at parliamentary elections), said that they would vote and have voted before in municipal and regional elections, but only three had voted while living in the US. Generally, they that they all agreed to: - It felt overwhelming and like a lot of work to sit down and really get an understanding of where they should put their X on the voting paper. They didn’t believe that one article or one TV debate could help give them an overview, so they felt like they have to invest a lot of time. - Something that was repeated many times was the notion that they “didn’t know where to start”. - None of them really knew the rules or practicalities for voting by post. Those who had voted had found the information after they had decided that they wanted to vote. - It was a hurdle that they didn’t feel like they really had a sense of what was going on at home, it felt “distant”. - Those who didn’t vote felt guilty about it, but it was just too much trouble, and they generally didn’t feel that it was as important to vote as it would have if they were in Denmark. - Many of them expressed a wish for a reminder of some sort of that something was going on at home. They suggested text messages, Instagram profiles or tips in the Facebook groups like “Danes in New York” or emails from the organizations for Danish expats, like “Danes Worldwide” - Three of the Danes generally do not keep up with Danish (or American) news and did not know that the election was going on. They agreed that that they usually form their opinion, and realize that there is an election going on, through friends/colleagues/family and information that they just happen to hear while listening to the radio, watching TV, etc. - Many of them agreed that they would quickly feel “stupid” if they didn’t know the process and didn’t know what to vote, so it was easier just not to vote. Wishes from the Danes: - Something that reminded them that it was something they needed to check out and remember. - Something easily accessible and not too overwhelming. Rather encourage them to read/watch more somewhere on the internet than getting too much information at once. - Some sort of generator box where you could enter your country/address and then you would get the address of where your nearest place to vote is located (like an online store locator) and what the voting process is in details. - A simple overview of what they could vote for which made differences in opinion clear - Clear guidelines for where, how and when to vote. Some of them expressed that they did not want to go somewhere (which would be the embassy/consulate) to feel “stupid” and “confused”. - Not too many emails/notifications – they do not want to get spammed because then they will turn it off/delete it. Look: - Simple, short and precise, but with options for further readings - It shouldn’t look informal, but not too dry either. “It shouldn’t look like something boring from the municipality trying to guilt you into voting, but like an easy way to figure out what is what. For your own sake” Almost all Danes are eligible to vote for parliamentary-, municipal- and regional elections as well as referendums and EU parliament matters by post no matter where they live or go on holiday in the world (some do need to sign up for it though). Around 35.000 Danes live as expats in the US, and around 175.000 Danes live outside Denmark in total. But it is hard to get an idea of what is going on at home when you are not anywhere near where the political campaigns are taking place; you don’t experience the events, see the election posters, hear all the small news about what someone has now said or done at your lunch break or glimpse the newspaper headlines. It is harder to get an idea of all the parties and individual politicians for a municipal election, for example, because it takes time and effort to get updated, and the amounts of information is enormous and overwhelming. Whether it is because you are already busy following the news of the US or if you just don’t follow the news in general, it’s easy to forget/not prioritize to take the time to become more informed. And regional or EU parliament elections are not sexy, breaking or visually pleasant, so they don’t reach people on Instagram and Facebook in the same way as many other news do. It seems like it will demand a lot of time and work to gain the information needed in order to turn it into action, so it is just easier not to look at it at all – knowing the overflow of information that you will have to process makes you passive. My thoughts about so far about format/content: - Target group: Danes living outside Denmark - Format: weekly newsletter with links to further readings in the period before an election. 3-4 newsletters before and a follow-up - Language: Danish - Purpose: to make it easier for Danes living abroad to get a better sense of elections taking place in their home country, try to minimize the hurdles that causes them not to vote and make the practical process of voting by post more clear.

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Idea: How might we use a cooperation between the editorial process and the design to nuance debates within the same publication? 

I think a problem of publishing and media is how each media only presents one side of an argument about a certain subject, event, problem, etc. This means that readers of a certain publication will read writers they agree with and who agree with them, and that editors and writers will be preaching to the choir. I do not necessarily believe that this is wrong, but I think it would be interesting if it was somehow possible to combine opposite views in the same publications so that readers will face not only the opinion that they agree with, but also the opposition and the arguments it has. I think the media coverage often lacks nuances, and that it is a problem that we like, read and follow the people who agree with us, but often does not take the opposition seriously or even take our time to look into their arguments. Those who watches Fox News for example rarely watches The Daily Show, and it creates divisions and misunderstandings between people who begin to, by default, disagree with other groups of people no matter what the subject is. 

For this reason, I think it could be interesting to work with a publication that as a concept presents opposite/conflicting ideas against each other in order to try to give voice to more sides of the same subject, add more nuances and leave the reader with an idea of what is on each side of the argument. It would have similarities to the debate sections of a newspaper, but the whole idea of the publication would be to not represent/support on ideology, but collect the best arguments that belongs to different world-views and standpoints. 

To me, the interesting and “unexplored” connection would be between editors and designers. My idea is that the editors and designers would have to work closely each time to use both the writers’ words and design to accentuates similarities and differences under the overall theme. I think it could be interesting to use design to both bridge and point out differences between different angles and opinions on the same subject. 

My idea of form and content for the publication is a magazine that it takes up present political or cultural issues and tries to view it from two or more sides. An example could be Facebook’s Free Basics program. It would set up two sides of the argument around this project - one article would be in favor of Facebook’s idea of improving the world through connectivity, while another would criticize the financial exploitation and the significant gain of power that Facebook gets through their program. In my mind, the pages of the magazine would emphasize that the articles had different angles and opinions, but also the similarities and what they agree on. It might let the articles run on adjoining pages or maybe letting each article run vertically with one in the top and one in the bottom. Colours or other tools that create a certain emphasis for the reader could be used to show the main points where the two parties agreed or disagreed. I would like the design to accentuate that this is two sides of the same thing, and what I think is interesting as a reader is to look at the places where they agree and disagree. It should be subtle (not as clumsily and pedagogical as my drawing, but it was just to show some thought on what the pages could look like (see the second picture) 

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THE MOST INTERESTING ESSAYS OF THE SEMESTER To me, the most interesting essays we have read through the semester is George Packer’s Cheap Words and James Somers’ Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria. They both accentuate how big corporations now more than ever affect what information we can and cannot access and how we get to access it. The democratic and artistic ideals of books, newspapers and libraries are now evolving in times of capitalism and huge conglomerates, and it leads to situations like the Google-lawsuit which now has ended with an enormous online database of 25 million books in the hands of one of the worlds largest corporations which no-one can access. I think both essays convey the idea that involvement by Google, Amazon and similar firms in the publishing business is always in a sense a double-edged sword and that in every project they take on, the publishing business must weight whether they would rather accept the muscles and possibilities the companies bring or keep them out of “their” business. And as far as I can see, it is a hard decision every time with artistic development on one side vs. financial gains one the other.

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1. How might design help change that people often only read the headline and subheading of articles? 

 2. How might we change the fact that people mostly read and get presented with information by sources that they already agree with? 

 3. What if we worked out some sort of model that ensured that authors and writers could make a living from their writings in the future? 

4. How might we ensure that big companies like Amazon does no set all terms for the publishing industry in the future? 

 5. How might we nudge readers to fact check and read counter-stories to the stories they share and like? 

6. What if we could use design to nudge people into thinking about online quality content as something they should pay for? 

 7. What if any like or read post on Facebook automatically included a counter-argument or counter-source further down your feed? 

 8. What if we could design a way to moderate content on Google and Facebook? 

 9. How might we use design to separate garbage from quality on the internet? 

10. What might we do to avoid that online content will not only become short and concise, but also be designed in a way so readers will be interested in exploring longer, more elaborated writings?

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Status of the internet

Both Troll Thread (TT) and The Serving Library (SL) provide free content that is easily accessible through the internet. They have simple, quite homemade-looking designs and their pages are very easy to navigate as a user. TT’s simple design presents each work on the main page with name and two buttons which offers free download in pdf format and the offer to buy the work in print whereas SL offers pdf-downloads of all their works and the option to buy their annual magazine, single issues or a subscription. Both websites’ contents are free, downloadable and printable. My first impression is that this is a new kind of self-publishing that makes it easy for writes to make their pieces accessible, but without all the middle-men in a conventional publishing process. As Joseph Yearous-Algozin says in the Troll Thread Interview on Poetry Foundation’s website, it is resource-saving, ”poor publishing”: “My particular interest in working with digital platforms is that the work can be published, distributed and consumed without money changing hands. Rather, we’re parasites on multi-million dollar companies. Using Tumblr to host our PDFs and Lulu to print books with no upfront costs, means we didn’t have to waste money on staples, paper, or xeroxing. In effect, Print-on-Demand and PDFs are what poor publishing looks like”. This is, as he says, cheaper and easier than conventional publishing if you as a writer want your things to be published. However, as the team behind TT also says, this kind of production is also a lot faster and less thorough (or at least it can be). Fastness is a factor in their way of publishing, and that might affect quality. The content might become “poor” in more senses than simply cheap: “I don’t want to argue that the kind of work that TT is publishing is not literary, clearly we publish “books” and PDFs that we label as poetry and are distributed, for the most part, within different poetry communities. However, their status as literature has certainly become more generic or general, while also becoming more ephemeral and reliant on a different speed of production/publication/distribution. I think Chris Alexander’s definition of literature as “post-medium” can be useful here. Or, that in flattening out the text and making it more easily distributed, it loses an important part of its aesthetic, i.e. exceptional, status.” I am not sure the situation is the same for SL as the site is created run by a university. Fastness might not be as important. But it is interesting if their works of serious writers will suffer from the same as Yearous-Algozi claims – if their works lose an important part, the exceptional status, as well? If the sender and content becomes less important than the medium because the medium is considered “less”? It is interesting as well why this free internet sharing would be considered less exceptional because it is easily accessible on the internet. Is it traditional thinking? Or is it the lack of curation as Chris Sylvester claims that TT and most of the internet has?

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The dilemma of the Authors Guild vs. Google lawsuit is really interesting. It seems to be a situation which cannot be solved in a way that makes everybody win entirely. Reading Google and the Future of Books by Robert Darnton from 2009, the case seems quite clear: 

Free-market advocates may argue that the market will correct itself. If Google charges too much, customers will cancel their subscriptions, and the price will drop. But there is no direct connection between supply and demand in the mechanism for the institutional licenses envisioned by the settlement. Students, faculty, and patrons of public libraries will not pay for the subscriptions. The payment will come from the libraries; and if the libraries fail to find enough money for the subscription renewals, they may arouse ferocious protests from readers who have become accustomed to Google’s service. In the face of the protests, the libraries probably will cut back on other services, including the acquisition of books, just as they did when publishers ratcheted up the price of periodicals.

But then looking at James Somers article Torching the Modern Day Library from 2014 about the proposed settlement between the parties, it seems less clear if the “solution” that the parties ended up with in the Authors Guild vs. Google lawsuit was actually the lesser evil. He interviews Robert Darnton who now sees things a bit differently:

“Insofar as I have a regret, it is that the attempts to out-Google Google are so limited by copyright law,” he said. He’s been working on another project to scan library books; the scanning has been limited to books in the public domain. “I’m in favor of copyright, don’t get me wrong, but really to leave books out of the public domain for more than a century—to keep most American literature behind copyright barrier,” he said, “I think is crazy.” 

Can the power of these huge conglomerates be good? Do we have alternatives to their cooperation anymore? Whose intentions should we trust? It’s all very blurry to me, especially in this case. However, when an article like Cheap Words by George Packer is then thrown into the equation, I immediately get back into my firm belief that these companies never ever do anything that will not benefit themselves when he ends his article by saying:

At the moment, those people are obsessed with how they read books—whether it’s on a Kindle or an iPad or on printed pages. This conversation, though important, takes place in the shallows and misses the deeper currents that, in the digital age, are pushing American culture under the control of ever fewer and more powerful corporations. Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?

And my very first reaction is to think “Absolutely not!”. 

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What stuck with me most about John Hermann’s Access Denied is when he in the end of the article writes: “These are globe-spanning companies whose impact can be felt at the macroeconomic scale, but they exist within this one tiny slice of the world. The place seeps into the products. The particulars and peccadilloes from a coast become embedded in the tools that half of humanity now finds indispensable”. It’s not at all a new notion that power is centralized, but it is quite scary to be confronted with how much this small area and so few people are shaping the lives of all of us in such a huge degree. 

This is also accentuated in Alexis Madrigal’s The Weird Thing About Today’s Internet when he makes a long argument for how the media and the critics which we have long believed to be the offerer of truth is being questioned as the ideas developed by these huge, powerful conglomerates have presented new platforms that seem to offer even more immediate truths. Their position as as mediators and translators is now threatened by the all-consuming online products as Instagram and Facebook, and will have to reconsider their role in the world: “The publication that assumes the role of mediating the truth, or providing a unifying context for the Happenings of the World, is a peculiar fit on a platform that does much of the same thing under a different pretense. It will have to become something else, which is something I suspect a lot of publications can’t afford to do”. 

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“Today, digital fonts are legally defined as software, once again as the digital counterpart of a tool. This has broad consequences for the way fonts are distributed and sold, and the way type designers are earning their money (...)”

In Typeface as Programme, Jürg Lehni’s main question is if typefaces should be considered software as they are today. He does not believe that the foundry houses and designers are paid what they ought to be. If typefaces were not defined as software, but recognised as a piece of artistic work by a creative individual, then the designers could get pay according to use like musicians, photographers, etc..  

The most interesting part of Detail in Typography to me was the repetition of how, after the parameters and components have been adjusted and placed according to logic and scientifically confirmed rules, the eye of the designer (or non-designer) ultimately had the last say. Typography and layout have many rules that are great guidelines, but it is important to remember to take a step back and reevaluate if your case calls for different solutions that the textbook prescribes. To me that is what accentuate the artistic work of typography, which Lehni also mentions. 

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Designer not as Author