Neeti Sivakumar

The Reading Room

Web platform for location-based content

Role: Founder
Team: Neeti Sivakumar, Anushka Trivedi, Ishwari Arambam, Oshin Padhye, George Panicker, Riyam, Shreya Pidikiti, Himanshu Erande

Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, HTML, Javascript, CSS

The Reading Room is a collaborative storytelling project that enables us to think of place differently. It received two rounds of grants from Goethe Institut’s ‘C3: Coding, Creativity, Communities’ grant. The platform consists of three versions -
Lite: A simple listed version of all the stories with a search function. 
Adventure:  A choose your adventure experience that is built by the audience through hyperlinks.
Outdoors: This is a geolocative sound-based experience that helps storytellers share ‘voice notes’ at particular locations. 

Screenshots: Userflow diagram

Design: Through an initial survey, the team discovered that the pandemic had reduced the time most people spent outdoors, even alone. There was no appeal to exploring and wandering in a city.
As a result, we developed multiple versions of the website to explore the possibilities of interacting with content creation about locations.

For example, in the Adventure version, the experience embodied the physicality of how we navigate space - strolling, turning corners, eavesdropping - through familiar digital interactions - scrolling, hyperlinking, bookmarking/search history. The cyber flaneur could travel during times of isolation across these imagined realities.

Screenshots: User interface for the Reading Room

The Reading Room is a work in progress. The website currently consists of a text editor/publisher, map builder, hyperlink generator, search/filter, account/profile and login via magiclink generator, so on.

The project will be phased out with the support of user testing and qualitative research.