Cross Cultural Storytelling

What we have done. This week we have continued with our brainstorming process to address the critique we received last friday. The critique was mainly that we needed to define and narrow down our concept in more detail. To solve these issues we have discussed what we want to achieve by our service. For example, the question in whether our service should be a plug-in to an existing newspaper is not aligned with our goal of being a multi-subjective source, at the same time we want to be the “main” platform for news consumption. In the end, we agreed on the service being a platform, which publishes news from different news sites, where the reader can choose the preferred label in the home country. However, if the chosen newspaper should post biased news, the reader will be alerted with the “deviation alert” and will see the story told from other angles.

We have also started researching some about symbols and their meanings in different cultures as well as looking into Johan Bävman and his parental leave photos that different cultures had various opinions on according to the jury.

What we will do. For next week, we will divide work within the group, because we feel that we need to do more research from now on. We want to research technologies, user behavior when reading news, and information visualization to make it comprehensible. We also want to review the sources that were mentioned during the critique and see if we could conduct an expert interview with a journalist, or someone who has insight in biased news. Here is our to do list:

• Start with a business case 
• Specify the product/service 
• Summarize functions and features of the idea - technologies? 
• Create product identity 
• Research how we will consume news in the future & how we consume news today 
• Research icons/symbols meanings in cultures, colours in different cultures. 
• Make contact with Point of View group and Eye Witness group to check their ideas and maybe get inspiration. 
• Search for articles written in “different ways” due to different cultures to use as example during presentation.

Challenges encountered. Right now the challenges are to limit our scope and decide how our service will be designed in a good way to achieve the desired goals. As a group, we feel like we are communicating better now than in the beginning and have started to work more efficiently.


Changes in the project. We don’t have many changes in the project this week yet, since we hadn’t decided exactly how our project would look until last week. Since the jury seemed to like our presentation and idea, we will continue to develop it even more. We will focus on doing more research to see, if our ideas are possible or if we have to change some parts of the project until next week.

Resources. We have used the two websites Omni news and Recordedfuture to get inspiration and we will continue to research more during the next week. Further research is needed to narrow down the concept and make the solution “clearer”. In order to also use more examples of articles written in different ways due to different cultures as mentioned above we’ve also read through Johan Bävmans (SvD) article considering parental leave.