SLIMME JOURNALISTIEK
DESIGN RESEARCH AS A CONNECTIVE AND ASSOCIATIVE PROCESS FOR INVESTIGATION
2465 WORDS BY MAXIME BENVENUTO
View of the research installation in the Van Abbe Museum.
Starting with one news article, a single thread, a whole web of international relations and economic dependencies can be traced through a multitude of news updates and photo opportunities. The spider in this web is called Jack Ma, the liberal self-made CEO of Alibaba, popular in East and West. The Chinese government has a strong hold on private companies and the agenda of Alibaba is probably in line with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party. Can ‘design thinking’ help to map and better understand this political play? Throughout the past decades, it became clear that the institutions of journalism have failed to react to the digital revolution. They did not change their way of operating, nor foresaw what the soaring of the internet meant for their practice. Throughout this short article, I will elaborate on design research as a practice that has the potential to engage with and within the journalistic practice and to prototype innovative ways to approach the making and disseminating of news items. To do so, I will use a design research project that I worked on between 2017 and 2018, The political atlas of Alibaba, an inquiry into the Chinese internet giant and its political ties.
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In 2017, I was approached by Martina Muzi, curator and design researcher, to work on a research project to be exhibited in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven as part of the exhibition GeoDesign: Alibaba. From here to your home. The pitch was to look at the legal corridors designed by Alibaba to develop its commerce on an international scale. Like in most projects, I did not know much about the subject before starting. I thus started to scan news articles to get a broad understanding of what I was dealing with. Among some of the articles, one appeared important to me. It was titled “Alexis Tsípras’ charm offensive on Alibaba” in the French newspaper Courrier International. The article was elaborating on
