Tons of Updates from Echo

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

There are tons of updates from team Echo! June is going to be a busy month for us, as we are aiming to launch our pilot within the next four to six weeks in the Candler Park neighborhood of Atlanta. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on that. Here are some notes on what we’re working on:

We added a (much-needed) project manager/business manager to our team, Shannon Hubbell. Shannon is a dream come true - she not only keeps all of us on task every week, but she is super smart and full of brilliant ideas. Also, she is incredibly passionate about entrepreneurship (having helped to found two start-ups in the Atlanta area). Shannon is helping us explore whether Echo can become a viable business and, if so, what our business model should be so that we can generate enough money to sustain and grow the project.

We’re reaching out to local organizations and hope to establish partnerships with groups such as Trees Atlanta, PEDS and Atlanta Bicycle Campaign, among others.

We have completed quite a few rounds of story collection and talked to lots of amazing people along the way. (We had a fun afternoon where we simply wandered around the neighborhood and accosted people on their front porches with our recording device.) We have some really fantastic content that we’re currently editing.

We’ve been working with Joe from Art Through Labor (http://artthroughlabor.com/) to do some sign prototyping. Here’s a picture of the latest evolution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iheartecho/3564174893/.

We started a Flickr group! (See directions on our Flickr group page to join.) http://www.flickr.com/groups/1121810@N23/pool/. A Twitter account and Facebook page will be coming soon.

We’re getting ready to reach out to our pilot neighborhoods by attending the Candler Park and Lake Claire neighborhood association meetings in June and July and writing up announcements for their respective newsletters.

And, we’re party planning! We’re hoping to launch with a small early evening tea/cupcake party in each neighborhood, preceded by an afternoon of Echo walking tours. We want the walking tours and party afterwards to be events where neighbors can meet and get to know each other better.

Sign of the signs

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Karyn and I stopped by our friend Joe’s shop this week to talk through some options for Echo signs and got to watch a few of them materialize before our eyes. (Note Karyn’s awesome photos!)

Joe owns a local design-build shop that makes furniture and signs and full-scale installations for places all over town, so he’s got some pretty nifty equipment, including a machine that makes incredibly precise cuts in all kinds of materials. To give us an idea of what he can do, Joe cut a few variations on our logo out of some metal sheeting.

One thing we learned today: for all our experience in building web pages, we don’t know a whole lot about the way designs work in physical space. Joe asked us lots of questions about how we expected people to spot and interact with the signs, which naturally included notions of readability and distance and dimensionality, none of which figures a whole lot in the 2D world of our beloved monitors.

Joe kindly offered to give the logo and signs some thought and come back with a few options for us to consider. For now, we’re thinking of going with signs in the shape of the “o” in our logo, so it looks kind of like web-map pins coming up out of the ground in real life. Cool, right?

Exciting Developments

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Echo beta launch is approaching fast! We’re working through final iterations of our logo and site design, and the back end is coming together. In the month of March we’re going to be doing some serious story collecting, both through a few more scheduled interviews with Lake Claire icons and through some community outreach so that we start off with a nice balance of produced stories and community-generated ones.

Once we finalize our logo design, we’re planning to work a friend of ours who owns a contracting and design shop to see our signs come to life.

Last week we took a fantastic trip to Athens, Georgia where we gave a talk about Echo to a graduate class in the College of Environmental Design at UGA called “Ideas of Community and Place” (sounds like a fascinating class, doesn’t it?). We had an incredibly inspiring discussion with Professor Lara Mathes and her students about storytelling, building & nurturing communities both online and in real life, new trends in data visualization, and the design of urban spaces.

Here’s the best part: the final project for the class will be to work with us to install Echo Athens!

Each of the students will produce a short piece about the design of a type of public space (e.g., a cul-de-sac or a plaza) and tag a spot in Athens with that story. It is our hope that the stories generated by the community will then either speak to or perhaps contradict the intent of the design. Most of us probably aren’t aware on a daily basis that the physical design of a space very much shapes the way we interact with that space and with one another in it. We think the Echo Athens series will surface this dimension of everyday lives in a really beautiful and thoughtful way, and we couldn’t be more excited.

In addition, part of our plan for Echo has always been to produce a “kit” of sorts that we can hand off to another community so that the people who love that place the most can stand up the system easily and make it their own. Echo Athens will be a first opportunity for us to test out this idea, and we expect to learn a lot from it.

Happy new year!

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Happy new year from the Echo team! We hope that everyone had a fantastic holiday. Both of us took some much-needed time off at the end of December, but we did manage to get a bunch of content to our developer and designer so that they can begin their work in earnest this month. We finished editing our first batch of stories (about a dozen from the Lake Claire neighborhood) and sent off the audio files and accompanying metadata. We also put together wireframes and content for the first release of our site. Adam (our developer) and Ronnie (our designer) are both now hard at work, and we hope that by the time we post our next blog entry, we will have some preliminary designs or even a prototype of the voicemail system to share with you.

December update

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on the back-end infrastructure for Echo. In addition to the giant flow chart we’ve created for mapping out how users will navigate the system, we’ve developed a spreadsheet outlining all of the pertinent metadata for each of our stories. We also just finished developing wireframes and content for the first phase of the Echo site, which will prominently feature an interactive Google map zoomed into Lake Claire, our pilot neighborhood. We can’t wait to see how our designer Ronnie translates all this into a beautiful visual interface for Echo.

In the back of our minds we’re also wrestling with an interesting challenge, which came about when a friend who lives in Lake Claire told us that his wife remembers the runaway pony story differently (hear it from our 9/8/08 entry). How do we showcase a story when multiple people remember the event differently, and can tell it from various perspectives? If we can find an elegant design solution for this, we can help evolve multimedia conversations online to a whole new level. If you have any ideas or would like to chat with us, drop us a line!

Big weekend

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Team Echo spent the weekend in New York City, where we met up with our designer and developer in a picturesque start-up-y setting: a giant, open, randomly furnitured office loft in Dumbo. (Thank you, News Groper, for lending a Saturday afternoon perch!)

We spent most of the day Saturday working out some tough questions from our developer Adam about the structure of the Echo database, and how the various pieces of data will flow between the web and phone systems. We also talked through the hierarchies of location data and organizational structures we need to give our stories. Like, what happens when themes begin to emerge among stories and across neighborhoods?  We’ll want to add in some new categories and connectors for, say, a civil war bike tour or a map of tales involving barbeque, on the fly without having to rework the database.

Basically we need to balance the competing needs of an organic, user-generated system with some bigger, flexible principles that will bind the pieces together in some meaningful way. Nothing bigger than the problems the great minds who built the Web in first place are still trying to solve, right? No wonder we wrestled so mightily through the afternoon.

We also got a peek at logo sketches from Ronnie, our designer, offered some direction on finishing them, and topped the evening off with a delicious dinner with the whole crew at a restaurant called, appropriately, Superfine. (Try the pork chop, it’s amazing.)

Sunday we spent mostly walking and talking through lower Manhattan, building lists of to-dos for the next two weeks (meet with our accountant, get wireframes to Ronnie and the first batch of stories and metadata to Adam) and feeling genuinely ecstatic that it’s really coming together.

Back to business

Monday, September 22, 2008

We laid low for a couple of weeks while we worked like crazy at our day jobs and did some lovely traveling (Seattle and fabulous Brazil), but last week Echo was back in full force.

The first order of business is a massive flowchart for the voice xml system that will power the mobile phone element of Echo. It gave us a new respect for those automated customer service lines (press “1” to get some help already, “2” to hear these options again ...). Our idea is fairly simple - hear a story or leave one - but thinking through all the options, and then mapping them out in a way that wouldn’t be completely confusing to someone standing on a street corner with a cell phone is anything but. We feel good about where we landed, though, and made an important decision in the process. We’re going to organize Echo stories around two main principles: neighborhood and emotion. More on that coming soon.

Also, we met an incredible woman at a little gift shop in Candler Park, very near where we started the Echo pilot program. It turns out that she’s the local neighborhood historian, the woman who spends her days running a gift shop and her nights poring over old letters at the Hargrett Rare Book Library at the University of Georgia. She’s kindly promised to give us and our tape recorder a walking tour of the neighborhood. We’ll try to set that up this week, and hope to have our first batch of pilot-ready stories for our first neighborhood shortly after.