Category, Time, and Space: Structures in Cross-Media Design and Production

The purpose of this empirically informed, but mainly conceptual paper, is to understand what we might mean by the word ‘structure’ in cross-media design. The paper draws upon a workplace study in print and online news production at a Swedish local news publisher, where we observed the work of reporters, page planners and web editors. Structure in the context of cross-media design and production is initially defined as the pattern of arrangement of elements in the media. We identified three kinds of structure in our observations of the journalists’ work: category, time, and space. Category: how knowledge is ordered is foundational and explains how functions and content relate to each other. Time: the temporal structure is how functions and content are ordered in time (what comes before and after). Space: The spatial structure is the layout of functions and content in 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional space. These three kinds of structure have corresponding design representations in interaction design: concept maps, flow charts, and wireframes.