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Prototypes, Visualizations Take Shape in Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab

Today marks the end of the second week of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab, an experiment in which 63 “mad scientists” with ideas for how to improve digital storytelling have been thrown together in a common digital space to learn and refine those digital ideas.

In the first week, we heard lab interface designer Aza Raskin speak about the power of the prototype; Storify co-founder Burt Herman offered up the ingredients of a successful news startup; and New York Times graphics editor Amanda Cox demonstrated the power of data and visualizations.

In the second week, Chris Heilmann, Mozilla’s international developer evangelist, discussed increasingly influential web technologies; jQuery creator John Resig offered guidelines for creating successful open-source projects; and Adaptive Path co-founder Jesse James Garrett detailed the significance of user experience design in product development.

Each lab participant is required to post a weekly “thinking out loud” blog, as well as a final software product proposal. As MoJo faculty team member Phillip Smith pointed out in an earlier Idea Lab post, the goal of the entire Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is to “stop yammering and start hammering.” And with paper, video, prototyping software and code, that’s exactly what many of the Learning Lab participants have already been up to.

So, as a tribute to the prototyping/brainstorming theme of the first week’s lectures, here’s a rundown of some prototypes and visualizations that emerged in the first “thinking out loud” blog assignment. Help grow the community by checking out these thought experiments, offering your feedback, or adding onto them with your own twist:

This is by no means an exhaustive list, merely those that came out in the week’s first assignment; plenty of awesome visual aides were in the original Project Mojo entries, and you can find a list of all Learning Lab participant blog entries here. Comment liberally if I missed any good visualizations of cool product ideas, and keep an eye on what emerges in the second week of blog posts!

Cody Shotwell :

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