Creation of Change

Symposium:


Presentation Title:
  • Creation of Change

Presenter(s):


Abstract:

  • Creation of Change was a collaboration graduation project among students from three departments: fashion design, interaction design, and graphic design. lt involves developing a digital trend book on CD-ROM that aims at informing and inspiring designers from various disciplines. The idea originates from our interest in the mutations of the society, which underlie the future evolution of design. We consider a design-dictation expiring in the future and hope that the “audience” will be more involved in a design process. Information transfer from the designer to the consumer will become information exchange. Trend-forecasting was until now presented as a linear story, what allowed the dictation of few people over the changes in design. Non-linear, interactive storytelling should make forecasting more “democratic”: The forecasters are not dictators any more, but more something like “foretellers” in the Middle-Ages: they bring bits and pieces of news important for a particular location of the (global) village, entertaining the people with their intriguing atmospheres, but its up to the people themselves to make their own associations and connections to their own situation. Creators of future stories are therefore not only the people gathering information and visualizing it, but also the people from audiences themselves. The notion of author and receiver is beginning to blur. The language forecasters/storytellers could use is a hybrid between visual, scientific, symbolic, and “common” (oral) language. The only media that allow the dynamics of this integrated language are new-digital media, not only because they converge different disciplines, but because the essence of these media is constant change and dynamics, as is the essence of the main topic of forecasting stories—the future. Within the narrative environment of Creation of Change the participant switches between the stories, following own interests and intuition, creating their own yarn about the future. The”switching” between the items and story-lines should be tactile and natural. Therefore we developed a “sensitive” interface, where the user has to draw and push the icons (symbols for linked items). The prototype shows the complex system of integrating different media into a structure of 5 stories, visualized in sometimes interactive animations with relevant text in between. The interaction within the animations should provide a stronger feeling about the content (for example, one of the items deals with the chaos within today’s cities, a chaotic way of interaction will let the user “feel” frustrated by this chaos). When a story is created in and for an interactive medium, the roles of influence change: instead of the stories becoming a part of our lives and swaying our experience, we are the ones who enter in the world of stories and our actions are influencing the story’s environment. At least, theoretically. Up to now, the language used to tell an interactive story was not “elastic” enough to allow a simultaneous influence of the user and his/her immersion in the story. Can this be changed?

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