Trinity Mirror Regionals

Exploring conversational UIs for news and information

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For the Manchester Evening News, I developed a project to explore how the city’s inanimate infrastructure could become the conduit to layers of information, stories and other people without those objects actually being connected to the network.

The exploration looked at how this idea could be used to help a news organisation to become part of the fabric of the city.

By the end of the project we had created social objects from a neighbourhood’s existing infrastructure which citizens can converse via SMS and Twitter to “get in the know” about a specific place.

Our approach went beyond conventional approaches to open data such as data visualisation, maps, etc and towards humanised suggestions that prompt and guide individual action. The social object speaks in the first person, answering questions as part of a dialogue in a different context for journalism, ie next to friends and other services in SMS and chat apps.

Find out more about the project