A Shoreline to Inspire Participation - Text 2
Developing The Shore Line (2017) project was a bit like running a laboratory on participatory processes. We relied on collaborators and users to guide the way forward. My team and I were inspired by engagement strategies of long-format documentaries, but we also wanted to discover new opportunities. How might we use emergent tools to foster networks, engage in dialogue and discover participatory aesthetics? And what kinds of engagement might an interactive documentary foster that another documentary form would not?
The scope of our project was ambitious. The Shore Line involved forty-three profiles of individuals across nine countries who were dealing with rising seas and challenges along our global coast. We didn’t want to overwhelm users. To curate the massive amount of creative material, the project was conceived as a futurist “storybook” with six distinct chapters with story pages that linked to videos, educational toolkits and maps. Users could also navigate the site through a database or via a dynamic “atlas” that placed video profiles in conversation with data visualizations that were designed to communicate the impacts of coastal development on wetlands. And while the creative interaction of these diverse media forms is what made the project unique, to have an impact we also needed to create a community of engaged users.
Our first step was to identify our target audience early on – teachers, youth, and community organizers. Our method was to share our work in progress. Rather than waiting for a definitive launch we developed an interim website where we showcased the video profiles as we developed them. This offered us a unique opportunity to foster a network amongst the very individuals we were profiling. For example, when we led a media workshop for youth in Panama, we shared our youth profiles from India and Norway. The Panamanian group was enthusiastic to see what other youth were doing, and as a result they saw their own efforts as part of a larger initiative. Our interim site was an instance of “in-reach,” a way to foster connections between and amongst our emergent network and the inspiring individuals we were meeting in each location. Our interim site worked as a public sketch pad. It was an open platform where we could adapt, explore and begin to identify the emergent aesthetics, themes and connections between each place and story. Our sketch pad was also helpful to begin conversations with interactive designers who would help us integrate additional affordances like dynamic maps, visualizations, soundscapes and more. The interactive designers also helped us to further develop our conceptual and visual aesthetic, one that could hold all the fragmented media pieces together.
After our official launch, we continued to develop collaborative outreach initiatives with teachers and organizers. We knew that educators often use clips from feature-length documentaries and that they appreciate concise study guides. We had our ready-made collection of forty-three shorts, so our challenge was to curate the collection with future users. We invited environmental organizers, experienced teachers and graduate students to author one-page study guides. They chose a related theme like environmental journalism or youth leadership and paired it with a selection of three films. Together we came up with guiding questions, activities and additional resources. Then we featured these one-page guides on the website and shared them widely. We also transformed our interim website (our public sketch pad) into a forum for educators to exchange. Teachers could share how they were using the site and be inspired by each other’s examples. Again, our intention was to foster connections and share resources as our network of teachers and our engagement strategy evolved.
An ongoing reminder throughout our living lab process was that iteration was key and that interactivity needed to be fostered online and offline. To inspire participation online, we had to cultivate relationships and invested users before, during and after the official launch of the project.
