Tagged: what if

Actively interacting interactively

The importance of interactivity in digital texts and how that differentiates old and new media.

Not all digital texts are interactive, but those that aren’t could usually be taken out of the computer and played by another medium.

Ryan asks what this might mean for narrative form and storytelling, and as a self-diagnosed, scaffold-loving, traditional narrative fanatic, I am also interested in what the future might look like in an ever-expanding networked media.

I really like these diagrams of plot graphs Ryan provided – they offer a range of perspectives on narrative that don’t necessarily have to conform to the traditional structure.

I found most interesting what Ryan raised in the last section, that interactivity is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of relations between the user and the text. So far in the examples of hypertext I’ve looked into, at least online, I’ve had to simply click different sections and links and I’ve been transported to a different story segment. But where else could this idea of interactivity lead as technology progresses? Admittedly, I’m still transfixed by the idea of a build your own adventure theme park, but the directions that could be followed… I can’t begin to fathom.

  • Links:

On Evan Williams’ newly launched publishing platform, Medium, a big focus is on sharing and collaboration. Articles are arranged by themes so that readers can contribute and gravitate toward content that fits their likes. The comments are set up to aid in that too. They’re not at the end of the piece, but sprinkled throughout, paragraph by paragraph. The aim is to foster dynamic discussions around what you’re interested in.

“The crowd can actually improve the quality of the content,” says Williams, who also co-founded microblogging site Twitter. “Our goal is to create a better place to read and write.”

The Publishing Industry’s Secret Sauce Is You

Television has already grown to have what AMC calls the “two–screen experience” with certain shows. The new NBC show, Hannibal (which I recommend highly), live tweets during its episodes, and Sam Witwer live tweets during the SyFy show Being Human for both the East and West Coast air times.

So let me bring this back to the issue that spurred this blog: ensemble casts and the changing nature of big movies.

A Different Kind of Experience

The world’s first interactive street-furniture installation is for Nokia’s N-90 and the moment it detects a pedestrian it springs into life. The monolith-like installation first swivels either right or left to ensure that the creative message is directly in front of the consumer. It then snaps a photograph of the person and displays it on a screen.

Street Furniture Gets Interactive (2006)

There is no way to deny that fact static pages just don’t cut it anymore. With every company combining social media profiles with their standard websites, designers are discovering more and more that creating a successful site means embracing interactivity.

Internet users view countless websites each day, so as a brand you need to figure out how to stand out and make your mark in the mind of the viewer. One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate interactive elements on your site. The goal is to draw the customer in and engage them through interactive element—innovative scroll navigation, animated characters or unique click controls. Whatever you choose to do you have to make it worth talking about.

Interactivity Is King

Interaction is something as simple as pressing Space to make the story continue, and as complex as deciding the fate of a universe based on your actions. Such interactive storytelling breaks down into three rough categories. There are games that wish to tell you their story, and ask you to complete tasks that allow it to be told. There are games that have stories which can go in multiple directions, and allow you to choose which of these pre-determined routes to take. And there are games that provide a template in which you can tell your own story.

– Games Are The Ideal Place For Telling Great Stories

A very important factor of interactivity in games is how the player experiences and learns about the story. Audio, visuals, and other elements of a game help to create truly interactive experiences.

– Interactivity as it Relates to Video Games and Story

Books belong to their readers

Chantelle‘s entry this week about books that change each time you read them excites me almost as much as I think they excite her, and it reminded me of something I read once that asked a question along the lines of: what if when we read we are reading what we want to read, or in a sense what our imagination makes up as we go along, ie that we write what we are reading as we read it.

I also think this is the cutest thing I have ever read:

With the aid of technology, we can create millions or trillions or billions (not sure which is bigger) of stories.

While I think the idea of an ever-changing and never-ending book is amazing – I mean we have all mourned that heartbreak of when a really good book ends, right? – I can’t help but think it already exists.

It’s funny, but it seems each time I read James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, it’s a different book, begging the question: Has the book changed… or have I?

It’s one of Ted Mosby’s quintessential quotes, and it gives a nice insight into this idea. My life has literally been changed by certain books: they have this power of changing the way you think and subsequently how you go about your life. And I like to believe I grow as a person and a creative as I open my mind up to new ideas. As our experiences grow, our perspectives change, our prejudices are disrupted… these factors all influence who we are, and often re-reading a favourite book after a few years can feel like reading an entirely different book all together. Has the book changed, or have I? I know that I’ve changed, but I don’t see why these concepts are mutually exclusive. Books belong to their readers; we impart our own meaning; we construct our own knowledge from the information presented to us.

 

The question isn’t to be or not to be

The question is HOW to be.

I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake this week with my readings and lecture posts, but they are coming I swear! This subject has caused me to stew endlessly about topics I didn’t realise I was interested in but then ultimately just re-post interesting things I find online as my thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations. (Ie, I spend too much time on Tumblr.)

I’ve been looking back over the first couple of weeks of this course, and I’m struck at how simple but profound it is to make the content relevant. In one of my typical mid-semester uni meltdowns about the future and whyyyyy is life so hard, I was brought some kind of solace in Adrian’s words from week three (possibly not verbatim, please forgive my note-taking skills): We are invited to dance. We don’t know how the dance goes; we don’t even know the first steps. But this is not a reason not to dance.

So with these words and a constructivist perspective in mind, really all that is left to do, is do. We learn by doing, we learn by making. In making we show our thinking, and fwock all I do is think/overthink. The only way to learn to ride a bike is by riding a bike. <Insert more cliches that are actually insightful and helping me with my life here>

How am I supposed to know what I want to do or at least in what direction I want to take my life and career without experimenting and trying out different things? We considered in the first week why we are at university, and I think that might be a big factor: the opportunities for experimenting and playing with different fields are almost endless. RMIT definitely know what they are doing in that regard.

The last few weeks have also seen me ask myself ‘What if’ more times than I care to admit, and outside of a design framework this question is easily applied to life. What if I joined this club, or wrote this article, or posted this clip I’ve been sitting on for months, too embarrassed about what might come of it. Embarrassment is overrated. There’s no time like now to be brave, and what is the worst that could happen? Yes, publishing online is permanent and media professionals success and failure is largely based on reputation, but who is going to fault someone for trying something new, taking a risk. There’s nobody I admire more than those willing to put themselves out there, take the fall, laugh at themselves when it all goes wrong.

I’ve had a few projects on the back-burner for a while and I’ve been inspired to bring them out. I hope you don’t judge me too harshly. What if we all just took the leap? Why shouldn’t we just do it?

Life is a mess. But I don’t think that’s necessarily, or even at all, a negative thing.

Here is a thing I did – from my current scrapbook/ideas/notebook: my original ‘blog’

This is How it Works: This is Not How it Works

“My advice: stop using “this is how it works” as a defense, or an excuse. Use it as motivation. Use it as a guide for where you should coming from. Use it as a starting point: “this is how it works today, but this is how we want it to work tomorrow, and this is how we want it to work the next day.” That begs the question: how? Experiment, create, believe in what you know and the inspiration found all around us. Let your imagination and creativity run wild. Let innovation rule the day, even if it’s risky and cautious, show the world that anyone can reinvent the way things work as long as they stop preventing themselves from living in a closed off world of “this is how it works” so don’t even try anything else.”
Alex Billington, This is How it Works: This is Not How it Works

Thinking, as we may.

Dr Vannevar Bush’s ‘As We May Think‘ is another article that has amazed me on some clever individuals’ forward thinking, a true testament to WHAT IF.

It’s also made me think about more recent possibilities that has come about because someone was brave enough to imagine and see their idea come to fruition.

Using Banana Peels in the Production of Bio-Plastic as a Replacement for Traditional Petroleum-Based Plastic

Simultaneous Biopesticide Wastewater Treatment and Bioelectricity Generation in Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC)

The Hand Warmth Flashlight

Aside from these girls, Elif Bilgin, S.M. Sambavi and Ann Makosinski respectively, (all 16 or younger) making me feel extremely inadequate, they are outrageously inspiring.

Never stop spinning.

More thoughts on Design Fictions feat. Bruce Sterling

Design fiction:

  • an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling
  • the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change

Some examples of this diegetic prototyping, also described as the fictional making as a way to think about real things, can be found on the aptly named Tumblr: Diegetic Prototypes.

I particularly like the ‘Robot readable world’ video below, which has immediately sparked numerous ‘What if?’s and ‘How can we use this?’s and ‘What about if?’s, so despite some trepidation in reading about diegetic prototyping, I think I might be a convert after seeing some examples.

Robot readable world on Vimeo

 

 

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

Writing about hypertext by writing in hypertext, or:

the only way to learn how to ride a bike is by riding a bike.

… to unify and and organize in the right way, so as to clarify and simplify our computer and working lives, and indeed to bring literature, science, art and civilization to new heights of understanding, through hypertext.

The ‘cloud’ we use, both cloud services and file sharing services, as well as the ….. sphere of endless websites all linking, borrowing and reappropriating each other ….. however Nelson’s article also makes it clear how far there is to go.

What if, what if, what if! Certainly there are also endless opportunities to revolutionise and keep literature, science, art and civilisation evolving as new service emerge out of ideas born from design fiction and diegetic prototypes.

 

This diagram from the reading shows the concept of moving from hard copy to soft copy, and I think a modern equivalent to some extent is Ancestry.com – a website specialising in making hard copy documents available online (for a price).

In fact this reading is quite prophetic, expecting the increase in cloud-like software and even the changes in organisations such as schools and universities. What is most terrifying is perhaps that 2020, the year that Nelson asked readers to imagine as far off in to the future, is now not so far away at all. But undoubtedly even in the next mere seven years, what technologies and gadgets that will be used most prolifically haven’t even been conceived yet.

 

Thoughts on Doctor Who by Boob Tube Dude

The issue is NOT that Moffat didn’t cast a woman (or a non-caucasian of either gender). It’s that the thought of casting one NEVER SEEMED TO ENTER INTO THE EQUATION. It’s as ludicrous to him that a woman would be the Doctor as a man would portray The Queen. Both represent a type of drag performance that might be amusing but certainly not authentic. And given that science fiction/fantasy is a place where “what if” and “why not” have their safest homes, it’s disheartening to see limitations put on a show that is, by its design, utter limitless (…) Here we arrive at the central distressing thing about today’s announcement: It missed an opportunity to push the boundaries of what not only Doctor Who can achieve, but science fiction serialized storytelling in general. The show’s growing popularity isn’t a reason to keep things status quo, but an opportunity to change things up and have something to say to its ever-growing fanbase. (…)

Had I not heard these rumblings before today’s special, Moffat’s comment about The Queen probably wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. Had Moffat’s companions been strong, independent figures that weren’t ignorant of their own origins, Moffat’s comments would have gone unnoticed. Instead, his comments formed a triptych along with the other two elements that suggest a large, systemic problem that has absolutely no bearing on Capaldi’s capacity to play the Doctor but everything to do with Moffat’s ability to steer that ship.

Instead of focus on the new Doctor, maybe we should be focused on getting a new showrunner. The TARDIS can go anywhere in time and space. But Moffat seems stuck on the same patch of antiquated soil.

Find the complete article here.