Creating the nutritional label prototype, at one level, did exactly what I wanted it to do for my thesis. I had an object to talk around. The feedback I received became a lot more focused. The concreteness of a prototype elicits feedback that’s grounded in what’s on the page, not just some handwaving I did.

At another level, it is nerve racking. The questions this prototype elicited are much more pointed, and address multiple levels. At the system level, people have been asking me to justify my problem selection, my audience selection, the rationale of my approach. e.g.

• What is the consequence of this? What if it functions different than you intended?
• If you’re tackling political apathy, why use a quantitative infoviz approach, instead of an edutainment approach? (e.g. Upworthy & Buzzfeed)
• If you want more people to engage, why target the already interested? (context: my audience is framed as “interested, inclined, but disempowered.)
• If you want to communicate quickly, why not use partisan shortcuts like Democratic-vs-Republican support?
• … etc.

Outside of system level questions, there’s of course questions at the implementation and design levels as well. In addition to the questions, people have given me wide range of ideas adjacent to my thesis topic to explore. Ideas around what metrics to show, how to incorporate feedback, how to push feedback through to congress, etc.

How do I respond?

With regards to the questions, I am not yet sure. There are a lot of questions that contain actionable criticism that I certain plan on incorporating. There are other questions, especially at the system level, that I will simply have to address with strategic rationales. The question around the use of a quantitative approach over a edutainment one stands out as one of these. An edutainment approach may well reach more people, but that’s not the audience I am after, and I must stick with that choice.

My response to adjacent ideas is similar. I am entering the stage where I ought to focus into a small, management project. I believe I have a systematic understanding now of what Project L roughly needs to be (and I am working on something to explain it.) What that means is that I must crave out the smallest self-contained system in the project, work on that, and say no to everything else.

This new conviction for Project L is exciting. It feels like I have some solid stakes in the ground now. I am starting to think I’ve entered a different stage of my thesis work. Let’s see where this goes.

(Thanks, by the way, to the kind folks over at Harmony Institute who spared an hour to chat about my project, and especially Clint, who made the connection.)