News as music, dynamically adjusted content to match your emotional state or combining mindfulness and news. IN/LAB is experimenting to find news experiences that can engage news outsiders.
IN/LAB’s mission is to prototype future news experiences for current news outsiders. We listen to their perspectives, seek to identify pain points and explore how these can be catered to in future news experiences.
At IN/LAB, a joint venture between Schibsted and the Tinius Trust, we believe that co-creation holds the key to unlocking new ideas and solutions. By bringing together people with different perspectives, experiences, and skills in collaborative creative processes, we can better imagine what the future of news could look like.
Include to innovate
To enable sustainable developments in the news industry, we believe more diverse voices need to be included in conversations about future products and formats. In this age of rapid transformation, our industry needs great ideas – and we need to – recognise that they may not always come from people heavily invested in traditional ways of doing things.
A 2023 study by IN/LAB and Järvaveckan Research showed that close to half of Swedes and Norwegians actively avoid the news, with frequent news avoidance being especially high in socio-economically vulnerable areas. We think it is of critical importance that we bring these voices in; we need to talk with, not about, them and their perceived issues with the news media.
When we share that our lab is called “IN/LAB,” many assume that the “IN” is for innovation. But really, it stands for inclusion – which in turn enables innovation.
Co-creation with young users
Our efforts have involved diverse groups, including young teenagers from outer city Stockholm, young tech enthusiasts and graduates working to fight climate change. What all our great co-creators have in common is that they express various pain points in and from their news experiences. These pain points involve news that makes them feel too sad and frustrated or news that fails to highlight diverse perspectives. Other frustrations involve experiences with contemporary product formats that don’t fit with the needs and wants of the group.
During our first year of operations, we have sought to understand these themes by hosting brief ideation sessions, deep-dive workshops, and programs spanning multiple months. The work always starts with a problem or pain point identified, upon which we typically phrase a “How might we…” statement for the selected group of co-creators to transform into a possible future solution. Example statements that our work has explored include: “How might we enhance voices from outer city areas with digital tools?”, “How might we involve our friends in our news experience?” or “How might we consume climate news in a way that gives us hope for the future?”
Prototyping Possible Futures
Our co-creation processes have yielded prototypes of varying degrees of sophistication. Regardless of their format, they serve the common purpose of inspiring thought-provoking discussions and raising important questions about the possible futures of news. To truly innovate, we need to be open to exploring not only the most probable or desirable scenarios but a broader spectrum of futures as well. This is important because some of the challenges facing the news media today might need more than incremental improvements.
By prototyping possible futures, we make them more tangible. Examples of IN/LAB prototypes include:
News as music was a prototype news experience presenting news to the beat of AI-generated music – or as an AI-generated rap song. The experience was tested live on Aftonbladet.se for 1,000 selected young users and was positively received. The idea came from the News Changemaker Program, our ten-week youth co-creation program.
Senti Sense is a fictional news product that analyses the user’s reactions to news in real-time and dynamically adjusts news content (e.g., language, tonality and angles) to match the user’s emotional state and empower feelings of clarity and understanding when consuming news. The idea came from News2030, our five-day design sprint co-hosted with Schibsted News Destination Engineering.
Mindfulne(w)ss is a fictional app combining news and mindfulness to make you more conscious in your news consumption. The app contains a conscious check-in, slow scroll and no clickbait – all to promote inner calm. It guides you through the emotions you get when reading a news story and helps you reflect on the news content. The idea came from our co-creation workshop with Naturskyddsföreningen’s young ambassadors.
The power of co-creation
By fostering an environment of shared creativity, we can find new ways of reaching potential audiences and tackling critical problems in the news media industry. Our work underscores the power of co-creation in sparking innovative solutions to shape a sustainable path forward.
By:
Molly Grönlund Müller
Community Researcher, IN/LAB
Belenn Rebecka Bekele
Community Researcher, IN/LAB
