narrative environments
Our second series of participatory workshops lead to a range of codesigned artifacts that represented our participants’ cultural tempos and changing paces of life. Ana and I started ideating ways we could design to extend these narratives to a larger audience to be able to step inside these stories and feel the different paces of life.
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A MULTISENSORY IMMERSIVE SPACE
Creating a space that had scaled up artifacts having interactive elements and an audio narration explaining what it stood for was what we ideated on. We created a plan of the narrative environment using three of the stories being the constant change of weather shown by the glasses, the difference in work life shown by the man with strings and clouds and the confusing coin sizes shown by the blank coins. We introduced an interactive element for each of these artifacts. The glasses having filters that can change, the man having some strings loose to tie on and the coins revealing the details on touch. After going through each narrative, we wanted to end the experience by having the viewers choose and map their own changing tempos.
The three stories used for planning the immersive space
A sketch showing the plan of the immersive experience
However, in the early stages of this idea, we started questioning would this approach be successful in communicating our research of the different dimensions of time? Why would someone want to visit this space? Would scaling up these models make a difference to the experience? Are we flattening the narratives by remaking the artifacts? Where would these stories live after the duration of the exhibit?
Capturing the changes of paces and tempos through stories and artifacts created a space for reminiscing and storing memories. It allowed for people to revisit their moments of unfamiliarity and have the ability to extend these experiences and support towards other people going through changes in their pace of life. A physical immersive space would not be able to capture or hold these layers of information. This led to the narrative environment taking a new shape.
A DIGITAL ARCHIVE
Creating a digital library or archive to showcase the different dimensions of time through the lens of cultural tempos was our final design direction. We created a prototype using Figma to demonstrate the navigation and design of this platform. We wanted to retain the physical artifacts along with the narratives. We created animations of the artifacts using Aftereffects. Upon hover, the viewer was able to see which culture this story originated from. Clicking the artifact would take you to the entire narrative which is supported by images as a reflection of the story and has an audio track which is the narration. The stories could also be navigated through filters which were different categories of tempos and viewers had the option of adding their stories and creating their artifacts to the archive as well.
Video 1 - Demo of the homepage navigation; Video 2 - Demo of the archive prototype created
Developing our design from the mapping of rhythms to the immersive experience to finally a digital archive was a journey of many trials and errors. The feedback we got from our tutors was that animating the artifacts reduced the physicality and complexities of the stories. We needed to further ideate on how to preserve the physical along with the digital. Another observation we made was the resolution of our artifacts being relatively low in quality. In our second workshop series, we provided materials that mostly ranged from string to paper. Providing higher resolution of materials to participants would increase the resolution of these artifacts. We needed to add more depth to our design and this could be brought by restructuring our workshop and providing clearer guidelines to the participants. Some of the features on our website also needed to be given more thought. Refining our archive design and workshop structure was our next step.