Radio Dabanga: Applied Design Research in Human Experience & Media Design

Radio Dabanga is a radio station that makes programs for Sudan. However, the station's editorial office is located in Amsterdam, because of Sudan's long history of repression of the free press. This means that the radio station's journalists must provide reliable information to the 43 million inhabitants of Dabanga while being almost 7000 kilometers away. So how do they manage that? In their illustrative case study, Koen van Turnhout and Aletta Smits show how user experience designers are increasingly using large amounts of data and artificial intelligence to develop new, meaningful, digital media products. Applied design research aligns perfectly with this approach. After all, it has the ambition to provide generic knowledge relevant to design professionals by solving problems in the real world. An aspiration that sounds like music to our ears.