Designing badges for a civic media platform: reputation and named levels

Badges are gaining momentum on the social web but known HCI design experiences are very few. In this paper we present a design experience related to badges and named levels for representing reputation within the context of a Civic Media Platform called timu. We describe our design methodology and the exercise we have devised for designing named levels together with users. We then describe our design vision which unites contextual details about timu together with the rhetoric of progression provided by the language proficiency system. In the conclusion we generalise our design results.