tl;dr: My thesis is about using interaction design to raise awareness about campaign finance reform, using Larry Lessig’s work as source material. A recent pivot led to thinking about thesis deliverables as four components.

1. A social media blitz to draw people in.
2. A storytelling/data-vis piece to convey scale of the problem.
3. A design fiction/prototyping piece to illustrate the solution (the American Anti-corruption Act)
4. A set of participatory activities to build the anti-corruption community

… where did this come from?

The Framework

The overarching architecture is derived from conversation with Michael Lewis on Monday. He outlined a storytelling telling framework in five parts: intrigue, problem, solution, benefits, ask.

The intrigue hooks people in, and the problem motivates the solution. The benefits shows how the solution is great, and the ask prompts a response. Mapping this to an earlier conversation with Albert Wenger when he framed this project as a funnel, the framework describes the stages of an conversion funnel.

The intrigue generates leads, into a landing page that evokes a customer pain (problem), promises to solve it (solution & benefit) and makes the ask.

Albert was very clear about how to work on the funnel. The funnel’s effectiveness is the product (in the mathematical sense) of its two dimensions: the reach and the conversion rate. To keep a long story short, Albert said (paraphrasing) don’t worry about your conversation rate until you’ve maxed out your reach.

Reach through Social Media

How do I reach people? Basically, through social media by igniting sharing on networks. The design problem becomes, how do I package a complex and nuanced set of ideas into a form that travels well on the various relevant networks? By understanding the mechanisms/psychology of sharing, and the culture of sharing of each network. All of this work is about expanding the top of the funnel, and can be summed up in the word intrigue.

What’s going to intrigue my audience, the political aware opinion leaders? What will they find interesting? How will sharing my message add value to THEIR audience’s life? How can I convince them of that?

(No answer yet. Need to try a bunch of stuff.)

Conversion through Storytelling

Once the audience enters the funnel, the goal switches to getting them to the ask. This is accomplished through compelling storytelling. At one level a lot of the work here has been done for me. I’m using Republic, Lost as a source material. The outline of the story, its ethos and pathos have been somewhat worked out.

My struggle is how to make it more compelling, and take advantage of the web’s interactive and social nature. For now, I intend to communicate the problem piece using data visualization, because the scale and interconnection of the corruption problem is better convey as visual data. (I mean, I’ve been doing this already.) A recent recognition is that data visualization will probably do a poor job of conveying the solution. Data is inherently backwards looking. The solution should be forward looking, and is much better conveyed through fiction.

Prototyping a Legislative Future

Prototyping is making an imagined future real enough to respond to. Designers prototype the experience of products and services all the time. Why can’t we prototype the experience of a piece of legislation? I’m quite excited at this idea of using prototypes to help people understand the benefits of the American Anti-corruption Act (AAA). I’m thinking about things like:

• What would an campaign ad post-AAA look like?
• What would the interface for contributing campaign finance look like?
• How would we educate the public about a newly passed AAA?
• How would a news story about a post-AAA funding race read?

The trick is constructing these so that they together paints a compelling vision of the future. It is visualizing hope and change.

A Call and Response

What do we do with energy that we’ve built up with the campaign? We channel it towards two activities:

1. Pulling in more people into the movement
2. Pressuring the decision makers

Of these, I believe the first activity is more important. It is Albert’s idea of expanding the top of the funnel, and building a campaign that is self promoting.

What’s involved in that? We want people to make the cause their own, and help them spread the message. To do that we have to examine what motivates people to put their name behind a message, and what inspire them to put energy into a cause.

I believe we have to help people own the idea somehow. Give people to shout in their own voice. I think simply asking people to tweet or share the story is underestimating the people’s involvement. I wonder if there’s a way to channel people’s creativity and passion, and give them a platform to express their desires.

Maybe a “what’s corruption in your own words?” or a “Visualize corruption” kind of platform?

Next Steps: A Minimal Viable Funnel

I really should have done this weeks ago, but I guess it took this long for the thinking to mature. My next step is to build a minimal viable funnel (with problem, solution, benefit, and ask) so that I can start iterating on the intrigue (i.e. the social media outreach.)

So, that’s the plan.