Tricia Austin
Course Director, MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments, Central Saint
Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London
p.austin@csm.arts.ac.uk
Mobile: 07939 104247
Rakhi Rajani
Consultant: Psychology & Design
rakhirajani@mac.com
Mobile: 07912 485811
Abstract for The Second International Symposium on Culture, Creativity,
and Interaction Design (CCID2) July 2011
Title : Arcs of Interaction
This paper demonstrates how the design of narrative environments provides an
educational and professional infrastructure for the practice of interaction design.
Narrative environments are here defined as physical spaces designed to provide
engaging and interactive visitor experiences, for example cultural venues, visitor
centres, museums, historic sites, educational environments, sports events, retail
and brand environments, product launches, urban and community environments.
The methodology for the design of narrative environments borrows from literary
and film practice to envisage an arc of interactions or touch points on a
visitor/customer journey. The design process creates, alters, adds or subtracts
narratives, or content, from environments by integrating artifacts, text, sound,
images, film and digital interfaces into the physical world. Examples, described
below, will be shown of how environments are explored and developed through
hard physical structures, materials and form, which tend to remain fairly fixed
over time; through, text, light, image, sound which can change quite rapidly; and
through the soft and most unpredictable dimension, human presence and
interaction.
This method calls for a multidisciplinary team approach that brings together
content developers, architects, spatial designers, media designers, graphic
designers, interaction designers, psychologists and technologists. Shared goals
and common vision are vital to enable the team to work through an iterative
creative process. The shared vision is formed through agreement about the
story to be told and/or the nature of the platform that will enable people to
exchange stories.
It is suggested that the design of narrative environments can offer both a critique
and additional experiential and theoretical dimensions to interaction design in at
least three ways. We argue firstly, that primary focus on screen-based
interaction, on fixed or hand held devices, does not take sufficient account of the
context of the physical place surrounding the user. We maintain that, as all
interactions take place within a spatial context, the spatial context frames and
influences the interaction. We follow Lefebvre’s thesis (1991) that there is no
strict division between physical spaces and mental spaces but that all spaces are
produced, lived and understood through relationships of power. In other words
no space is neutral but always subject to particular readings. These readings
shape our interactions with the physical world, other people and technologies; a
space becomes a place as we construct an experience within it, and attach
meaning to it (Tuan, 1977).
We take from Barthes (1977) and Eco (1978) a theory of semiotics which
suggests we recognise signs and interpret them according to specific cultural
codes. We maintain this intellectual meaning making combines with bodily
experiences constantly making and remaking our sense of self as theorised by
Lacan. (1968). We understand bodily experience through the theories of
Merleau-Ponty (1962) who suggests people read the environment through a
body schema that comprises not only of our physical body but also its
relationship to the surrounding world, in other words we carry with us a sense
of depth, dimensionality, flow, movement, form, colour, tactility, texture and
lustre. From Gibson (1977) we take that our bodies learn and become
accustomed to the affordances to act and interact offered by the environment.
Our body schema and our intellectual sense of self are largely unconscious as
long as the flows of interaction between our body and the environment are
familiar and uninterrupted and many interactions appear “intuitive”. New
experiences and interactives are accessible when they stay within the
parameters of people’s sense of self and body schemas.
Physical computing and the “internet of things” (Van Kranenburg, 2008) provide
a vision of a digitally enabled physical world where computing is integrated into
objects and surfaces that surround us, that we are familiar with and that we can
interact with in a more physically intuitive way. Instead of showcasing
technology, the ‘internet of things’ looks to subtly embed it into objects, placing
the focus of the interaction on everyday designed ‘things’ and not screens. For
example, to engage visitors with classical music, PLAY. Orchestra (2006)
recreated an empty orchestra pit of 60 seats to create a virtual orchestra.
Passers-by took a seat to experience a musical piece
from the player's
perspective. By sitting down, a visitor triggered
a recording of the
corresponding musical instrument and as the orchestra seats were filled, the
entire composition was revealed. The visitors could also download a ringtone of
the composition via Bluetooth and submit sounds that were later turned into a
new composition.
The more common way to share music is to offer it as downloads or to view it on
screen based mediums. However, here, by creating a physical experience of
music, not only did we place the music in the context of the musicians but
immerse the visitor in the experience of being a musician.
The second way that interaction design could benefit from looking through a
narrative lens is by exploring the dynamic of narrative. (Ricoeur, 1979; Brooks,
1984; Deleuze & Guattari, 1972) Narratives construct journeys, in many ways
comparable to physical journeys. The visitor as protagonist for example, enters a
shop, a museum or as a tourist in a district of a city with a purpose in mind. The
visitor has desire that drives their personal story onwards through space, and
through time, encountering people or things that might help (mentors),
problems and obstacles (enemies) that they need to overcome. By following their
sense of purpose or goal they may acquire information and experience that does
in some way transform and refresh them. There are parallels here to the Hero’s
Journey.(Campbell, 1949). The students on MA Creative Practice for Narrative
Environments at Central Saint Martins have recently completed a cultural trails
project for London’s West End Cultural Quarter, a consortium of cultural
organisations including the Courtauld Gallery, the ICA, the National Portrait
Gallery, the National Gallery, the Royal Opera House, Somerset House and St
Martin-in-the-Fields. The aim of the project was to create a physical and virtual
trail that would enable and encourage visitors to visit more than one prestigious
venue on a trip to the West End and heighten awareness of the West End’s
cultural offer. The students developed several proposals that created an
interplay between digital and physical environments, culminating in an
integrated digital–physical experience. Each proposal developed a synthesis of
research into visitors’ needs and expectations, the physical affordances of the
space and the content of the institutions which together gave rise to narrative
experiences creating anticipation and desire to move from one location to
another. The students did not produce an interactive map, they went further and
created story worlds for visitors to enter and explore.
The key issue here is not simply the individual interactions with an artefact, a
person or a mobile device, it is the drive to move from one interaction to the next
which is fuelled by prior interactions and their cumulative effect. The argument
is that single interactions and touch points do not, in themselves, provide a
complete experience. It is the combination of interactions through time and
particular spaces (Lefebvre, 1991), linked to the visitor’s expectations and
intentions, that provide meaningful and rich experiences.
The third way that interaction design can draw from the design of narrative
environments is through an understanding of the power of the story world to
engage people and author their own thoughts and actions (Parsons 2008-2011).
This is particularly relevant in transmedia interactions that take place over
multiple mediums, some of which need to engage the ‘reader’ to compel them to
contribute to an emerging story. The story world or the diegesis (Porter Abbot,
2002) is a fundamental and well theorised element of story telling. In film, video
and text, audiences enter eagerly into story worlds. Visitors in physical spaces
need to cross a threshold into a particular story of place. The threshold may be,
for example, the entrance to a museum, the climb up to the brow of the hill to see
the sand dunes, or the airport you land at for your weekend away, but once in an
environment you absorb and experience its stories. Sand dunes can tell a story
of natural forces, in the forms shaped by wind and sea power, high-rise tower
blocks can tell a story of socio-political forces, in the forms shaped by urban
concentration, favelas tell a different story of urban development, shaped by
dispossession, exhibitions tell stories of peoples’ material cultures, natural and
social histories, scientific discoveries, and so on.
The experience of the visitor, in a story world, with a sense of purpose, can be
orchestrated and enriched through the design interventions in that space. The
experience can unfold through haptic, olfactory, auditory and visual means, with
sequencing, framing, revealing and concealing, suspense and closure - all tools of
narrative discourse.
In summary the design of narrative environments integrates interaction design
into multidisciplinary practice and raises questions about how interaction design
can apply narrative theory, spatial theory and theories of performativity to
create new multisensory, meaningful and informative environments and thus
how it is possible to create connected interactions across different mediums.
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