The Copenhagen Project

The summer is coming to an end here in Copenhagen, and so it’s time for this project to get up to speed. During the last weeks Thomas and I have been discussing what we’re doing here, and we are now making some adjustments to our focus and the process. I will just explain what we have decided.

Our goal here is to push through some creative barriers that seems to exist after media has been moving from the physical world into the Internet. We are gonna do that by breaking down existing medias, offline and online, into the pieces it consists of.

An example of such a ‘piece’ could be ‘prioritized news’. The New York Times and most other newspapers and magazines is a good example of that. Digg.com’s front page on the other hand is just an expression of what stories made it above the front page requirements over time, just as this blog is non-prioritized. Even in conversations people usually decides to prioritize what they are talking about. So here we have two interesting elements that characterize all media: ‘prioritized’ or ‘unprioritized’.

Other examples is ‘participation’ vs. ‘consumption’, but also more descriptive elements such as ‘depth and detail’. By breaking down all media, we’ll end up with a lot of ‘elements’, ‘bricks’, ‘parts’, ‘perspectives’ or whatever we’ll decide to call it.

In the end we’ll be able to make up new media types in minutes by just randomly (and of course also purposely) combining the different bricks. A lot of interesting questions will emerge, e.g. how would digg.com be different if there was a daily, prioritized digest of the last 24 hours front page stories? Which new elements then come into play? Another example: what if The New York Time’s editorial board was extended to consist of all it’s readers, but all other elements was left unchanged?

We’ll use this blog in a wiki-like fashion, blogging about each different element with an explanation of what it is, how we see it relate to other elements etc. We aim for a non-structured, tag-like organization of the ‘bricks’, as many of them are inter-related in ways that makes it difficult to classify them.

The blog posts will be tweaked as we go along, so some of the posts may seem very short in the beginning and then evolve over time. Also, we’ll coin ‘bricks’ that may show to be to general, to vague or irrelevant, or there may be better words to describe what we mean. We therefore invite you to comment and discuss each post and to suggest other wordings, better explanations etc. during the process.

The final product will be a free and open catalog that hopefully will inspire people to experiment with new models, new concepts and new ways of improving this thing we call media.