🌏 A Digital Public Space in Miniature
A designer's perspective in creating an online community experience.
As we launched our Terra Incognita NYC research project, we also made public our Miro board dedicated to exploring the question, “What happens to digital public life when public spaces disappear?”
Our researchers traversed New York City’s five boroughs through digital ethnographies and pulled out nine elements that compose digital public space: curation, membership, locality, publicness, safety, intimacy, affordances, temporality, and infrastructure. The Miro board illustrates these themes with vibrancy, pairing research with illustration and design to create an all-together different exploration of history, urbanism, and news.
The Miro board is a microcosm of the type of digital public space we’d like to see more of: it’s welcoming, participatory, educational, creative, and fun. The experience is layered with research, storytelling, and opportunities for user self-expression.
But Miro board usage does maintain some of the same issues brought about from the “private infrastructure” problems we saw come up in our report around video conferencing and webcams — not everyone can access it, it’s not so easy to navigate, and it hasn’t considered un-sighted people very deeply. It’s not a problem that Miro can solve since some of that infrastructure, like people owning laptops and having strong Internet connection in their homes, exists outside of the company’s control. We do hope, though, that designers continue to make advancements on these very important human considerations, like universal design and accessibility and the opportunity to experience this software offline.
Our New_ Public designer and artist Josh Kramer spent four weeks poring over the data and penning symbols and metaphors from the Terra Incognita NYC ethnographies to create a distinct audience journey in Miro. For this week’s newsletter, we would like to explore the design process through a Q&A with Josh. Follow him here on Twitter. We hope you enjoy this illustrated world as much as we have!
Q&A
New_ Public: You designed the Miro board experience to unpack personalized experiences through the pandemic, what were some of your tactics for storytelling?
_Josh Kramer: I wanted to make the board work on both a macro and micro sense as much as possible. If you just move through the sections and read all the text, then I think you can get a sense of the research and why we did it. But if you stop and create a small collage based on a memory from the last year, or call our phone number and leave a voicemail about it, then that is a massive success for me as the designer. It was a little difficult to find the right tone for the text, but I think the board jives with the tone we aim for with New_ Public in general: curious, sincere, and optimistic.
Why did you choose to work in Miro and not just create a PDF?
PDFs have their advantages: links to websites and within the document, sophisticated design, baseline familiarity with many users. But Miro is a nearly infinite canvas, where you can zoom in 400% and zoom out to <1%. There is so much visual real estate. Miro has its own kind of design language in terms of how I can lock certain objects and keep other objects available for users to move, duplicate, edit, re-size. You name it.
As a designer, it’s kind of terrifying, giving up that control. I know that a motivated user could trash the board. All you can do is keep a backup, model good behavior, and moderate live events. (Which is true for all social media in my opinion. A lot of things become unmanageable when they reach a certain size.)
And while there is a lot of potential for using Miro, it can also be overwhelming and intimidating. That’s why I tried to pepper the board with notes of encouragement and reinforcing that there’s no ‘right’ way to do anything. And, as opposed to the solo experience of PDFs, it’s amazing when you’re in Miro with others and you can see their cursor and watch what they do.
You have described the Miro board as an experiment in form. Your original concept was to create a time capsule of the pandemic. Can you speak to that?
Our research partners at NYU, Dr. Mona Sloane and Dr. Jordan Kraemer, handed us a hefty report detailing several months of in-depth ethnographic research in New York City. Our job was to create that report, as well as share it with the world. We wanted to broaden the findings out from New York, and invite our community to share their own experiences of living the last year online. We also wanted to create something rich and multifaceted so that someone looking back on the pandemic could gain a vivid understanding of this moment from our perspective. Miro, often used for meetings and virtual events, seemed to be a great place (and I do mean place!) to do this. The board was central to two live events in March, and now lives on for asynchronous interactions with whoever visits it.
Was the goal to expand the Zoom experience or to facilitate community engagement with the research paper?
This board had a mandate to do both of those things from the beginning. At the very least, the board had to provide a suitable backdrop for parts of the roundtable and not be embarrassing or distracting while very impressive people talked about serious things. At the same time, it had to celebrate and contextualize this research, and encourage people to engage with it and think about their own lives in those terms.
What was unexpectedly challenging in concepting the experience and how did you mitigate setbacks and failures?
We’re trying a lot of different stuff on this board, and some parts undoubtedly work better than others. I tried to make it fun, but I’m also competing with game-ified social media and Netflix for attention. On the technical side, I was impressed by certain things that Miro can do, like embedding a PDF you can page through in the board, but I think they need to make navigation more immediately obvious and intuitive for new users.
You used the Miro board to facilitate participation for a digital audience for two events. Can you lead us through how you used the board differently for each of them?
We did a Drawing and Collage Hangout in the middle section of the board, where I lead people through a prompt based on the work of Lynda Barry. The prompt is long and meditative and really puts you in a place to be open and experimental. That event was eye-opening about how Miro, when paired with seamless voice chat on Discord, can be a nice place to hangout and have fun. I’m excited about what we can do in future and how we can engage the larger New_ Public community. For our Launch Event at the end of March, we used the completed board both as a background prop and as a resource. We brought everyone into the board at the end of the event, and set them loose to explore and interact with it.
Miro’s new. What are some possible, but unseen and unexpected ways to possibly use the platform?
It seems to me that Miro is mostly used by tech companies for whiteboarding and developing new products. I’ve also used it, and designed for it, to be an open-ended slide presentation or visual component of a live virtual event. But it’s clear to me that there are so many cool and interesting possible applications of Miro as a storytelling or experiential medium. I hope people try new, weirder things with it. For example, I’m working on a fiction graphic novel and using Miro to annotate a floor plan for a fictional building, with reference photos, layouts and sketches. It’s perfect for that. There are so many creative practices that would benefit from a canvas where you can easily see the whole thing but also zoom in close. Why not a webcomic entirely on Miro? Also, I’d love to see a Game Master create a map for tabletop role playing games on Miro (think Dungeons & Dragons). It could take what I’ve seen on platforms like Roll20 to the next level. I bet it would be great for certain kinds of theater as well. I hope people push Miro in new, exciting directions and create vibrant digital public spaces.
Enjoy the Terra Incognita NYC Miro board for yourself and let us know what you think about the experience!
Our Terra Incognita NYC board was not our first foray into building digital public spaces in Miro. Early this year, we collaborated with MAP Design Lab to launch our New_ Public Festival with an online park experience planted on a Miro board. The park was built before, during, and after the event to collectively document the festival experiences, and witness public art in the making. The images culled to create a park were both analog and digital, placed side-by-side, to imagine a new form of public place for the future. Talk a walk into the digital park here.
What’s Clicking
🌐 Online:
If the real world is being taken over by the virtual then why can't the spaces be less representational of the real world and more exploitive of the virtual? (Dezeen)
Warner Bros. Space Jam website, dating back to 1996 was archived and restored. Go back in time. (Tedium)
From board meetings to birthdays: How to prototype an awesome experience. A webinar with IDEO’s Play Lab on April 28th. (IDEO)
🏙 Offline:
NYC Mayor launches new project calling for the creation of 10,000 jobs for projects to revitalize public spaces. (CityLand)
Biden’s infrastructure plan is a chance to make our public spaces and structures beautiful as well as monuments to democracy. (Jacobian)
Building new worlds of connectivity,
The New_ Public team
Illustrations by Josh Kramer
Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.