Kevin Kelly (pictured on left, with Chris Anderson - past and present editors of WIRED). has written in his semi-blog- Sounding Good on NPR:
"I was interviewed by Madeleine Brand on NPR's Day to Day today. They wanted to know about my Countdown Clock. Here is the streaming audio. What was interesting to me was that they sent a sound recordist to my home to record my end of the conversation on digital tape because the sound quality on our typical phone line (and call-in show) is so bad. While I was in my desk chair on the phone to Madeleine in LA, the sound recordist was sitting in my office pointing a huge boom mike at my face. She then uploads the file to NPR's ftp site and then the engineers there merge my side with Madeleine's side of the conversation. Mucho work. Isn't it odd that in 2007, when we can download movies to our home we can't have a high-fidelity phone line? Does anyone know how feasible it is to create or hack a hi-def home phone line? We have DSL; it should not be that hard."
So we have identified WHAT is needed to improve the process but we don't know HOW... KK has given us an idea but the best way to take a Design Journey is to challenge starting assumptions; in Design Diamond terms this is a quest. My first reaction is to think "the BBC Radio News has good quality live interviews over the phone."
A quick search of the BBC website yields The journey of a radio news story which describes the use of ISDN lines to get the quality they require. So we could do ISDN or DSL..compared here. So we seem to need specific service provision.. maybe. What about 3G mobile phone technology? Could we build a system around something like a 3G phone such as the Serenata
that incorporates B&O audio knowledge? The answer is that I don't know but we are gathering potentially useful information on conceptual routes which we can subject to more rigorous filtering. We might even challenge the starting assumption that we need a better phone connection.
Walking through the whole process and noting the experience at each stage may yield the insights we need to design a system that fits in with the context of use.
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