Page One Room — re-physicalizing the news experience
It is such a joy when a designer is able to say they’re working on something they wish they had growing up. When it came down to deciding on what to work on for my capstone, I wanted to conquer a problem that I uniquely understood, yet impacted many.
I grew up with a nearly inevitable language barrier, with my parents having moved to the US a year before I was born. Looking at non-immigrant families, more so than anything else, I admired the conversations they were able to have with each other. Conversations not necessarily about personal feelings or happenings, but about sports, politics, or art. But I realized that by more than a language barrier, there was a larger perpetrator in the decline in conversation in families: could there be a correlation with technology and information overload? I didn’t grow up in a generation of being able to ask, “Hey did you read that one article this morning?”, because we now live with both a 24/7 news cycle as well as largely personalized algorithmic news content.
The goal of my capstone project was to provoke a means to re-physicalizing the way we experience the news — to support a hypothesis that a more communal and conversational consumption with the news pushes for a higher quality of life and more meaningful relationships. It was very touching when I would share my project with others, and people would immediately resonate in different ways. My friend, John, told me about how his grandfather still clips out parts of the NYT and hands them around the breakfast table.
I grew up with a nearly inevitable language barrier, with my parents having moved to the US a year before I was born. Looking at non-immigrant families, more so than anything else, I admired the conversations they were able to have with each other. Conversations not necessarily about personal feelings or happenings, but about sports, politics, or art. But I realized that by more than a language barrier, there was a larger perpetrator in the decline in conversation in families: could there be a correlation with technology and information overload? I didn’t grow up in a generation of being able to ask, “Hey did you read that one article this morning?”, because we now live with both a 24/7 news cycle as well as largely personalized algorithmic news content.
The goal of my capstone project was to provoke a means to re-physicalizing the way we experience the news — to support a hypothesis that a more communal and conversational consumption with the news pushes for a higher quality of life and more meaningful relationships. It was very touching when I would share my project with others, and people would immediately resonate in different ways. My friend, John, told me about how his grandfather still clips out parts of the NYT and hands them around the breakfast table.
CMU Design Capstone
Spring 2024
Spring 2024
Duration
12 weeks
12 weeks
Role
Designer
Designer
The Hope
Why do we go to the movies, and then go to dinner after? Why is it that we will commute whatever distance and pay almost twenty bucks to meet up with someone of significance just to then sit in the dark and silence together for ninety minutes or two hours?
We enter this other world (one that’s not about me or you) together, to then obtain this shared knowledge of this other place. This knowledge becomes a third space almost, a conversation we know with certainty that we can have. Knowledge itself is a shared world open to everyone who has been in it.
My design capstone project is a novel physical manifestation of digital news, in an attempt to create one of these third spaces. We lost a lot of the experience of news consumption in the swift switch from the physical morning paper to mobile apps. I want to revisit and rebuild what was lost. How do our daily lives change when we have an established foundation of knowledge with those close to us?
I designed the objects that would allow for such a future to exist, and made decisions about the materials that would make such a product ready-for-market with existing technology. This project manifested as a set of e-ink tablets that would update routinely every morning with news content relevant to the family it serviced. The tablets are meant to sit on a kitchen table, and have a rotary bearing swivel mechanism that allows them to be easily turned around and slid across a table.
I researched and sourced hardware that would be most ideal for this project: e-ink screens that are (1) non-light emitting and (2) incredibly low power consumption (meaning they could be wireless; I think the batteries would only need to be changed once a year). I used a very small development board, so all together, all of the hardware comfortably fits within a 2cm tall frame.
I also prototyped the frames of the screens, starting with cardboard sketch models to explore form and interaction, and eventually settling with an eco-resin that I could cast into a soft mold. I 3D modeled a final frame, 3D printed it, and created a silicone mold out of it. There were several color tests, and eventually I settled on a medium-dark grey with specks of copper-y mica. These visual decisions were backed by a goal of a final form that felt like it blended in to a dining table — it was to be cold to touch like porcelain, specked with color like ceramic glaze, and supplement the color of the screens and push that content forward in space.
Lastly, a preliminary system of pushing new content onto the screens through a cloud server was programmed. Largely in reference to Max Braun’s project: https://github.com/maxbbraun/accent.
Knowledge as Space
The “Page 1 Room” is a glass room on the second floor of the New York Times office. Editors convene in a meeting every 4PM to discuss the stories on the front page of the next day’s paper. We don’t live in a world of “Front page[s]” anymore, but rather a world of Home “feeds” and “for you page[s]”. Technology has made it so that more so than ever before, the information we learn daily is what algorithms find most important to us (as individuals) rather than us — as a community. I believe that it is truly a means and act of love to share information, to know what others care about or are concerned by.
Thank You
Bryce Li, Michelle Liu, Jessie Chen for technical support. Andrew Chan for modeling support. Brett Yasko + Dylan Vitone for years of the most meaningful instructional guidance. My parents for the greatest gift a girl could ask for: the absolute privilege to pursue an advanced education.
I got to spend four years working towards a degree in a practice that fulfills me — another thing I only dreamed of having growing up.