Inspiring Solutions with Great Stories
When journalists decided journalism alone wasn’t enough, it was time to build physical solutions, then story them.
@viewmagazine Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is one of @Mediums top ten writers in journalism.
“Congratulations, funding for the StoryLab/ Innovation hub has been approved”, said the email from the Research Innovation Fund.
For the last year messages of support and appreciation for a program that bridges storytelling with problem-solving leading to physical solutions have been coming into our inbox.
“Thanks ! Was an amazing experience and would highly recommend the module to anyone coming through”.
“It was an incredible experience from beginning to end. The course is packed with opportunities to develop hard and soft skills on multiple areas and to build a valuable network. Lucky to have been a part of it!”
and this
It’s not journalism’s job to save the world, but supposedly report what it believes is important to its audience. That‘s what the profession has carried with it from its 18th century when notable figures like Daniel Defoe wrote the first formative modern account of journalism — the great Storm that battered Britain, before penning his fictional Opus Dei, Robinson Crusoe.
Yet media has no natural borders, particularly evident in the digital era-and- beyond renaissance. If media seems like it’s fixed that’s because the stakeholders and controlling parties create that perception.
“For many years, people like me perpetuated the myth that unless you were part of the television establishment, you couldn’t make television. Channel One Challenged that”
This is what Stuart Purvis said to me, a former CEO of ITN — the UK’s biggest commercial news and factual broadcaster and is today one of the UK’s most respected media figures.
Channel One was a platform and a UK social experiment in the 90s which demonstrated command-and-control media production was a sleight of hand. Thirty youngsters became the first Brit professional one-person-television-crews bursting the myth of TV making.
A decade later, Screen Gen content producers, remixing, refluxing and fixing in their personal spaces unequivocally tore to shreds the myth, and is so doing also spawned an industry that celebrated individualism over collaboration. It’s no coincidence that a film like the Matrix should prove deeply popular in the late 90s with its hyper tech hero journey’s storyline of he’s the one.
If you were to launch Channel One today its new prosumers (call them “Oners”) would be enveloped in innovative work mixing disciplines, using AI, creating new collective platforms, and exploring business solutions. In fact some of its alumni already have. But, here’s the thing to ensure a steady pipeline of this new creative, something will have to change at the source.
SCREEN CREATIVES
Jonny, 21-years of age, is atypical of the Gen Z as documented in Grown Up digital by Don Tapscott, Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age by Sarah Ogilvie and others. I’ve watched him up close. He’s my son. And according to literature, Gen Z has been misunderstood and attracted erroneous judgmental statements.
Jonny is into Black Panther. That’s his first rig above studying special effects at Uni. At five years of age he first beat me at EA Rugby. Ouch! By his mid-teens he’d amassed a spectrum of platform and Apps.
His twitch, visual acuity and spatial skills is common place across Gen Zs and analogous with a 2004 study of young laparoscopic surgeons, The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century. Trainee surgeons with game skills performed better at laparoscopy. Video gaming is good for your mind says creative expert Steven Johnson. For Jonny, whose developed a set of unique skills different to his parents it’s his passion.
“What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality”, writes Jane McConigal in Reality is Broken. At the UK’s Defence Academy in Shrivenham, Swindon, this is put into practice.
Artemis, a $40 game, a group and I are shown, is used to assess army personnel and MBE elites says Major Tom Mouat MBE to me and the business group joining him at the Defence Academy.
How they do this is I write about in Training tomorrow’s leaders, and cyber armed forces on a $40 game is to let people into a room with this computer game with minimum instruction.
NEW TECH AS OLD
In the ONERS collapsed disciplines questions are cultivated that address real life dramas needing attention: climate change, reeling racism, gaping financial inequality, food security, social turmoils and dogma politics.
How can ONERS make an impact in institutional settings? How? By playing a greater role in working collaboratively with their curriculum design and being assisted in engineering THEIR ideas.
If we use journalism as a funnel, more of the same journalism isn’t the solution says former BBC senior executive Pat Loughrey. Trouble is just like several disciplines modes of delivery are predicated on a top-down approach. If you keep on doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you get.
I’ve just recently organised one of the journalism’s major global events: The Future of Journalism, which brings together around 300 global scholars and featured Gary Younge as one of our keynotes speaker. It demonstrated Journalism’s utility should transcend normative subjects, except the industry has such a fixed conceptual boundary of journalism practice it’s mired in fixed solutions to problems and insists there’s one framework for doing news.
I’ve taught variable solution process across the world, such as Moscow, China, Chicago and Denmark, which I belatedly discovered aligns with the Finish education’s enquiry.
Tapping into the ONERS natural skills which they generally excel at: connecting, customising and collaborating, yields a pathway to deal with real world problems via an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approach.
The idea to educators of connecting different disciplines seems anathema or overstretch, yet it wasn’t too long ago in the 1970s when universities upped the industrial production of subject specialisms.
Prof Carolyn Marvin writing in When Old Technologies were New says:
“Discussions of electrical and other new forms of communications in the late 19th century begin from specific cultural and class assumptions about what communications ought to be like amongst particular groups of people”.
“These assumptions informed the policies of nineteenth century observers at what these new ideas were supposed to do and legislated the boundaries of intimacy and strangeness of the closing different world they presented to the audiences”.
In the late 90s Human Centred Design Thinking became a feature of Design schools taking a different disciplined approach to their work. Consult the end user, was the mantra.
In Finland, whose education system is already considered one of the best in the world, Fulbright scholar Janet English probes the country to find out what makes Finland a success delivered in her ebook: The “Finnish Way” to Optimize Student Learning (see chapter 11, A Summary of Lessons Learned).
Finland is now switching from fixed subject teaching to what it calls “phenomenon” teaching, that is by topic. Interviewed in the Independent newspaper, Helsinki’s municipal development manager Pasi Silander says “What we need now is a different kind of education to prepare people for working life.”
ANGEL’S TABLE
Six years ago in a TV studio in East London amongst some of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs the idea of a new approach embracing multiple inter-disciplines was being put to the test.
Could you build a program that fused several fields, where MA students engaged in some form of 3-dimensional chess? Each time you made a move, alternative problems present themselves and often they emerge from outside the core practice.
Finding a solution is one thing, seeing several different ways to frame a problem with different solutions is another. In my undergrad Applied (Maths) Chemistry days creating different molecular structures whilst testing its purity and yield continuously invited these question.
For our MA students, the TV studio dubbed the “Angels Table” was their months of work come good. With their mentors they were being prepped through a continuous cycle of work on being creative gymnasts, presenting their ideas, and ensuring the end user was plainly in sight.
Institutions look to build critical awareness and creativity amongst its cohorts, but how truly progressive is that if the subjects, as varied as they might be, are still siloed?
I have worked for some of the best branded media in the world e.g. BBC, ABC News, Channel 4 News and loved it. Yet there’s a reason why journalism can often find itself moored to conventions or class and cultural thinking.
One is relatively few institutions teach budding journalists skillsets that presumably sit outside journalism’s core, such as history, diversity, social economics, tech, and psychological warfare and their nemesis awaiting them — the dark side of PR and propaganda e.g. The Mohawk Valley formula. Few popular texts reflect on journalism being dependent on class, culture or that invented word race. Hence you get a situation Britain, the US, Russia, Ukraine etc find themselves vice gripped in.
In 2000, working in Dotcoms in Soho, start-ups such as Justgiving and Re-active (I worked for) showed just how much cross-knowledge was required to float an idea, and that success was predicated on continual experiments. Worldwide, the digital renaissance forced new thinking, though this was largely extended to tech and business-based approaches.
Therein were the seeds of 2014’s Digital Story hub. But before I get to that, a fresh experiment was put in place. In 2003 we introduced MA journalism students, much to their chagrin, to HTML/ CSS and design as core module credits.
For one day a week in six weeks of a full term students would build platforms that were as varied and impressive rivalling professional ones. They made it to top spots in SEOs and drew wide praise from industry figures in the BBC and Google to name a few.
CODERS
In The End of College Kevin Carey writes
[students] are highly sensitive to expectations and organisational culture if you give them a lot of work and commensurate support. If you give them free time and an elaborate social infrastructure centred on alcohol exemption they’ll react accordingly.
The operative word was “support”. But if building platforms from web 1.0 forms into dynamic xml mobile sites became the norm, could media students dive into interdisciplinary problem solving and build real world prototype solutions enveloping any number of media, tech and Art — VR, Smart Speakers, Apps, Data and AI?
Moreover, given the size of that task could they also refine a different form of journalism storytelling that would hold audiences attention, whilst also perfecting the pitch and marketing and branding plan? It seemed a tall order, but fortunately some key developments would prove invaluable and prove, yes! It would involve Apple, the Movies, and University curriculum.
If you work in a Uni, you’ve likely noticed a perennial problem. Even when you’ve made the point several times few students read the handbook. Why would they, one student candidly told me, “It’s boring”.
When I asked journalism students if they’d watched the news, few had. But when it came to a movie like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), 127 hours (2010), Wild (2014) and The 33 (2015), many raised their hands. What these films all had in common was that they were based on true stories, some were even newsworthy.
Yet 16–24 year olds don’t watch the news. Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, says news consumption amongst this age group at best amounts to 2 mins and rarely on television. What’s wrong?
There’s research that says covering the same old stories is a turn off, and wider choice compete for ONERS eyeballs, but research that has largely escaped the media industry reveals a major inhibitor is the style, form and and manner in which it’s made.
What if journalists used cinema as a trojan horse? Actually what if journalists relearned cinema’s impact in storytelling.
This hypothesis was presented at Apple, SXSW etc., the world videojournalism awards in Berlin. It became my doctorate — a complex interdisciplinary field — in which I came across a select number of international award winning journalists, such as New York Time’s Travis Fox, who used cinema to tell great stories. I made this video.
The third interest to launching the programme was diversity, which in 1990s went by a different name, “equal opportunities”. In 1999 despite continuing efforts for greater media representation, the media penny finally dropped. Diversity was as much about navigating self-interest, as it was power when it came to expressing agency. You can read How a Million Pound Racial Discrimination case created a Diversity and Inclusion Industry built on Sand for more on this.
These collective ideas underpinned a disruptive-progressive solution to the handbook; its design of and interactivity. A prototype was released to student and staff and proved hugely popular. It featured success stories from previous cohorts and external links advancing their curiosities. I’m partly credited with unintentionally playing cupid to two students, now friends, whose wedding we attended in Germany.
The whatever-you-want-program was launched supported by industry professionals like Lee Robertson and Stephen Wheatley consistently offering their expertise.
The three pronged approach was to:
- Address real-world problems and build solutions, cognisant of diversity collaboration, and co-creation.
- Find way to engage with multiple varied audiences, with empathy from those impacted
- Experiment and by trend extrapolation find fresh Story telling and design ethos, based around psychologies and formats on various platforms in an array of media.
Nasma turned her Journey, from Syria into an animated game, and was inserted into a real dersign agency in which she acted as creative director. Five years on from her TV studio presentation before experts, and her mentor, her project idea is finding new air from research funds .
This brings us to the present. In 2019, I moved to Cardiff University and working with my co-colleague JT we launched Emerging Journalism AKA Story LAB, and forged a relationship with one of Wales’ most progressive companies Tramshed Tech and new tech mentors, Iain, Robin, Chantal, Toby and Oliver.
The ambition is to roll the idea out regionally and then partner with interested universities. The funding is a small step. But then it’s a giant leap to showcase widely what can be achieved.
The LAB is run by Dr David Dunkley Gyimah and Creative Technologist JT.
To find out more how we run the current Lab click below.
