Strangers to Shoppers: You Look Marvelous Dear
As I said at my interview with Jay Rosen I would probably be doing an assignment for the Crowdsourcing Assignment Zero. I have indeed taken one on. It’s about freely revealing as told, I hope, through an interview with Eric von Hippel. Now I just have to get tell von Hippel about my plan.
Any how, while looking around Assignment Zero I read this New York Times story about an interactive mirror. As a shopper you can step up to it, say with your new suit or dress, and your friends, social network or complete strangers can instantly type in their opinions on how you look. Here is more:
IconNicholson, an interactive design firm in Manhattan, takes the concept of shopping in tandem one step further by streaming real-time video to the Internet and inviting shoppers to actively involve off-site friends to join the process. It brings fashion into the realm of social networking where people already freely share their opinions and lives via MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Web cams.
Here is more from an IconNicholson press release:
Designed by IconNicholson for client Nanette Lepore, Social RetailingSM mashes together social networking and the brick-and-mortar store so customers can connect live with their online friends while they shop. An interactive mirror transmits high-bandwidth video to friends who comment back via instant message (IM) and who send their own suggestions from an online catalogue.
IconNicholson says its:
User-Centered Design demands a rigorous understanding of our clients’ target audiences and business goals. We get our insights from more than just focus groups and secondary research, where lack of context turns non-ethnographic research into misdirected strategies. Instead, our User-Centered Design Process emphasizes primary research to properly understand user behaviors and engage them in a participatory design process (e.g., we ask users to name and organize tasks in the most intuitive fashion to them). This relies on early and continuous involvement with, and feedback from, end users.
Which takes us back to von Hippel who is big on getting end users involved. Finally what does an interactive mirror have to do with citizen journalism? I don’t know, do you? The question, you see, is the first step to finding a possible answer. For me it is one more possible arrow in the multi-media citizen journalism quiver.
