The Pararchive Project

Since Imran, Tom and myself started working on the Pararchive project back in October 2013, its working title has been something of a running joke. While it worked as a reminder of what the project aimed to achieve (a ‘parallel archive’ of individual, rather than institutional, commentary on archival material), it was clumsy shorthand. Besides,…

You could argue that “designing with the user” is a sensible approach – it’s certainly better than designing without them – but is it taking us closer to an end-game of “people in the developing world solving their own problems”? It may if you’re working with them to build a tool or platform which they,…

Earlier today Dean came across an old Made By Many project for ITV, Sir Trevor. The app is essentially an editing tool for web content, released as an open source project. It’s actually a curious mix of some of the storyblocks metaphors we’ve been designing Pararchive around. Where Pararchive is a series of blocks with attached metadata and media…

When they’re good, the words that make apps work are a holistic part of the product, not a decorative swirl on top. If we’re going to claim to tell stories with our products, it’s time to wake up and pay sustained, deliberate attention to the language that guides users through them. medium.com/re-form/what-is-narrative-ux-9400664660af

Seeing this kind of consideration for storytelling on the web is a serious about face. Not because writers and designers haven’t cared about storytelling, but because we may be past the point where they could still be successful despite not caring. Offhandedly dumping text into a column on a webpage used to pass for an…

I’ve tried to set up Cowbird to be a timeless project, as opposed to a timely project. Cowbird tries to encourage a deeper, more personal, longer lasting kind of self-expression than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Internet. It doesn’t necessarily follow all of the latest design trends, but hopefully it’s a space that…

Earlier this month, members of the wider Pararchive team were invited to host a 90-minute breakout session on our project at the Connected Communities festival. I closed the segment with some reflections on our approach to design & community storytelling; here’s my talk… Hey everyone, my name is Imran Ali. I’m one of the founders of Carbon Imagineering, a digital…

Kickstarter’s rapidly become the crowdfunding platform of choice, with well produced video content noted by veterans as the key to a successful fundraising campaign. Every January, the company publishes a beautifully illustrated but very static infographic to summarise the previous year’s achievements. This year they’ve chosen to publish this summary, along with some headline projects, as…