Arc.

A challenge by the Innovation Group at Al Jazeera to create an innovative nonlinear storytelling application. In response, I created Arc.

My Role

I called upon three friends and formed a team which consisted of a software engineer, copywriter, and project manager. I lead the project and designed what came to be known as Arc. We worked on this project over weekends and spent about seven days in total drafting the idea and prototypes. We won the second prize.

01.

What is Arc?

Arc is built on the principle that each story should have additional perspectives from the humans involved in the main narrative. It utilizes nonlinear storytelling to interweave these perspectives and create an insightful, inclusive and well-rounded narrative. Additional analysis can be found in our Keynote presentation.

02.

Home to Story

Using the mobile app, users can search, share or bookmark stories. They can also customize the reading style and maintain a profile to save these preferences across other platforms.

03.

Stories

Arc's modular approach weaves the human perspectives into the main narrative in a single cohesive story. The individual human stories are color coded for clarity and discussion/comments are always encouraged.

04.

API Integrations

The Arc. framework allows writers to seamlessly integrate dynamic content from other mediums, enriching the stories with interactive and engaging tidbits like videos, photo galleries, maps, etc.

Conclusion

It was gratifying to execute on a time-sensitive project on the side and still manage to take it through my design process, from research/discovery all the way to iterating/prototyping. In the end, winning the hackathon was an inspiring validation of the idea, but we recognize that it needs a lot more polish and thinking.

Learnings

It's essential to accurately assess a side project and understand the amount of work it takes. From ideation to conception we found it challenging to allocate sufficient time, considering all of our prior engagements. A heartfelt thanks to Hari Ananth, Lauren Willey and Justin Megahan for all their support.

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