Knowhere was an AI start-up with a mission to restore public trust in the news.
The question we were answering was, how might AI enable a news team to write balanced and unbiased journalism, at scale?
I joined as their Founding Designer and it was my job to design an AI solution for the newsroom.
We published a daily national newsletter called The Brief for an audiene of 500K+ readers and opened a local news bureau in the Florida Treasure Coast.
I joined Knowhere pre-launch as their founding designer because I believed in the mission and wanted to make a significant impact on the product and company.
TEAM:
3 Engineers
1 Designer 🙋♀️
1 Product manager/CEO
1 AI specialist
During my time at Knowhere, I was responsible for design leadership, introducing a design process to the team, and promoting a design culture that prioritized user needs, all while working alongside the company's founder & CEO to shape the product's vision.
For context, this was 2017. Cambridge Analytica had exposed that social media had a significant impact on the U.S. 2016 elections (i.e. information silos and misinformation from Russian interference). Public trust in the media was at an all time low and polarization was at an all time high. People also came to realize that major newsoutets (e.g. Fox News, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc…) painted entirely different pictures of the world. Knowhere was created to capture the market that had lost trust with establishment media, using AI-augmented, balanced journalism. I wanted to understand who we were, what we were, why we were doing this work, and what our story was (i.e. our brand). So, I conducted a series of Q&A sessions with the founders to understand their vision. I was merely the facilitator and the weaver. My job was to help them create a coherent narrative for the company and the products we would build.
An AI-powered content management system for the modern newsroom.
Ida (named after Ida B. Wells) was an AI-powered content management system designed to support the newsroom in collaboratively producing a high volume of high quality, unbiased news articles. The startup’s business model depended on serving a large market with a small newsroom, so Ida had to succeed.
PROJECT DURATION:
1 year
We launched successfully, on time, and the platform was used for over two years and went through several version updates.
Ida demo