Social media hub for NASA Tweetups. Aggregating the conversation around NASA and connecting fans with astronauts

Project

NASA run events called "Tweetups" where they invite the public to put their questions to a panel of astronauts and NASA experts at a live event. Fans around the world can also tweet their questions. Buzzroom is a website (and live event installation) that aggregates all this information, including tweets, photos, videos, news and calendar dates.

Design

I was provided with a preliminary set of wireframes covering all sections of the website, that I expanded upon and designed-out the final GUI. The majority of visuals shown here show a slight alternative style to the final website, which I later tweaked to incorporate more graphic elements from the main NASA website.

Involvement

Ideas
Design

Client

NASA

Date

March 2010

Agency

JESS3

Dashboard

The home page. A live stream of tweets mentioning NASA, trending topics, latest photos & videos, the most active users (on Twitter)... And at the top is a cool little feature whereby you can quickly compose a tweet to any of the astronauts, add #hashtags and tweet directly from the website.

Astronauts

Profiling NASA astronauts that have social accounts that you can engage with. The chart at the top shows the volume of (recent) tweets by the atronauts.

Astronaut profile

Each (social) astronaut also has their own page with their full biography, recent tweets and a data viz plotting their tweets over the course of the day. The user can rollover these 'plots' to view each tweet.

Tweetup gallery

Each of these much loved Tweetup events that NASA run has it's own page, with information, videos and photos from the event for fans to recall, share and talk about.

Media

All photos and videos on the site have their own page also. All media is tagged and searchable. You can see other related media and most importantly, you can share it! The large "tweet this" call-to-action making this very obvious...

Gallery

Viewing or searching photos.

Events

A calendar of events in the coming months, highlighting future Tweetups, launches and other key NASA diary events.

Live stream

In addition to the Buzzroom website, NASA also required a visual to present the live stream of tweets during their Tweetup events. This particular concept was intended to be viewed fullscreen either on the web or on a tablet. The user can cycle between keywords and the background image changes periodically, all of which can be downloaded as desktop wallpapers.

Installation

This concept is flexible in that the functionality could mostly be automated to be projected digitally as a data wall visualisation at the events, obviously stripping out the download wallpaper and interactive elements..

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