The Reading Room

Overview: Web-platform for location-based narratives

Team: Neeti Sivakumar, Anushka Trivedi, Ishwari Arambam, Oshin Padhye, George Panicker, Riyam, Shreya Pidikiti, Himanshu Erande
Role: Founder
Tools: Figma, Figjam, Adobe Creative Cloud, HTML, Javascript, CSS

Supported by ZKM (Karlsruhe), Goethe-Institut, BeFantastic Workshop support by Museum for Art and Photography

Introduction

The Product

The Reading Room is a social media platform for location-based storytelling. The Reading Room is home to all stories — from places without names on a map to segregated and integrated places, of places you wish you’d gone to or hadn’t, or the farthest you go in a day.

The Problem

Using principles of slow media, The Reading Room hopes to inculcate the notion of wandering through deep mapping. As makers of place, stories can be drawn from lived experiences or personal encounters.

The Users

It relies on a community of storytellers to redefine how place is perceived. The project looks at the possibility of pluralism in the phenomenology of space. By sharing individual experiences, vulnerable and invisible voices can shape place holistically. The project has become an umbrella of thought about how space is perceived.

Research

User Surveys

Initially developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the user survey was designed to understand what effect it had on interactions with community.

We gathered data from over 100 participants to understand how to shape our platform.

What non-essential activities do you do outdoors?

Has the pandemic affected how you interact with your neighbourhood?

‘My neighborhood consists of Senior Citizens and friends with comorbidity. Therefore I maintain social distance while interacting and socialisation has significantly reduced.’

‘Earlier, we could visit friend’s homes. Now, we need to think twice before dropping in as there are old people or kids who may get impacted.’

‘I am reluctant to meet people as things can be done over a zoom call or text, especially if it isn't friends or family. I also get tired after an outing much faster than I used to pre-pandemic’

User Surveys

The second survey was designed to understand what stories participants might be interested in.

85% of participants said they were interested in better knowing their neighbourhood.

63% of participants are interested in interacting with people outside their social circle.

What stories would you be interested in hearing about?

How would you like to hear such stories?

Secondary Research

Through literature reviews, we noted the nuances of storytelling media. We explored aspects of both 2D and 3D representation of stories:

Text
Image
Video
Audio
360 Image
3D Model (Point Cloud)

Interactions on Mobile

We studient the potential users could have to interact with the stories through existing touch gestures:

Drag - Draw
Long Tap - Highlight, Comments
Tap - Hyperlinks
Scroll - New Threads of Stories
Tap - More information, stories
Pinch - Layered Stories

Design Development

Defining the Platform Scope

Lite: A simple listed version of all the stories with a search function.
Adventure: A choose your adventure experience that is built by the audience through hyperlinks.
Outdoors: This is a geolocative sound-based experience that helps storytellers share ‘voice notes’ at particular locations.

In the Adventure version, the experience embodied the physicality of how we navigate space - strolling, turning corners, eavesdropping - through familiar digital interactions - scrolling, hyperlinking, bookmarking/search history. The cyber flaneur could travel during times of isolation across these imagined realities.

Task & User Flows

The team iterated through a number of user flows to finalize on a simplified story creation method similar to existing blogging platforms.

Image: Information architecture for web-platform

Image: User flow for storytellers and listeners for web-platform

Image: User flow for storytellers and listeners for augmented reality platform

Lite Version

A simple listed version of all the stories with a search function. Users can view all the stories tagged to a specific location.

Adventure Version

A choose your adventure experience that is built by the audience through hyperlinks. Users can only experience stories through hyperlinks within other stories.

Outdoors Version

This is a geolocative sound-based experience that helps storytellers share ‘voice notes’ at particular locations.

Screenshots: Final user interface for the lite version of web-platform

User Interface Design

Layout and Branding

Initially, the visual language was developed to understand what would stand out to the target audience.

The colour scheme borrows from existing branding language designed for the department of corrections.

After a few iterations, a formal layout and colour scheme was finalized.

Below are the final prototypes developed for the platform.

Image: Layout options for platform, design system’s visual language

Image: Final iteration on platform landing page

Screenshots: Final user interface for the Reading Room

Figma Prototype: Walkthrough of beta version of platform

Figma Prototype: Walkthrough of beta version of platform

Neeti Sivakumar

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