Social Archives: Circus Video

For the initial exploratory development of the living archive, we will be experimenting with the use of an iterative prototyping technique that involves using an ‘embedded prototype’. What this means is that we will be building a basic working system, giving the inner Circus Oz community access, and then further developing our design directions and prototypes based on quantitative and qualitative feedback as the community uses the system over time:

This method has come out of research that I’ve been doing around prototyping practices, user centered design, and user feedback mechanisms. The advantage of using an embedded prototype such as this is that it enables immediate community engagement with the design process (making the design more collaborative), and isn’t overly prescriptive in terms of design direction, which leaves us open to new ideas as the community starts to access and respond to the videos (important at this early stage of the project).

We already know (based on our Spiegeltent event) that Circus Oz ‘like’ to watch the videos. But how will they react when they can see the videos in their own time, on their own terms? What new ideas and uses of the archive might they think of once they have the collection in front of them? This prototyping process can help us answer these questions.