Interactive storytelling group

What we have done:

We have redefined our problem and tried to get more in-depth with it in order to have a strong base and argumentation regarding our concept. This was done by finding statistical data, references and reliable information that supports our theory and that it will be an serious problem in the future. We did a comparison between todays situation and the approximated future situation to see if it was a potential evolving problem or not, and came to the conclusion that our stated problem will still be a problem in the future.

With the research as argumentation supporting this as a serious problem the underlaying factors to the problem were extracted. Few of the factors were technology itself, automatization, a wish for a better economical situation and a better presence at a distance as the underlaying factors to why this was an evolving problem. Noticing that this actually is, and is likely to remain, a problem we also started coming up with a solution, we want to solve the problem for a specific target group by using the underlying factors to the problem as a cure for it, which resulted in a game. We want to bring the digital games outside by creating a location-based augmented reality game. A state-of-the-analysis, after reviewing our feedback from the mid-crit, revealed several applications with the same kind of concept but not with the same kind of goal. The goal is to motivate gamers to activate themselves physically and therefore prevent health issues. We want to motivate them, therefore we performed a litteraturstudie on how to make motivating games, especially with physical exercise in mind. This lead us to try finding the motivating elements in games and try to abuse them in our concept to create a suggestion for a game that could be a helping tool regarding our target group health issues.

What we will do:

We will continue the specification of the health aspects and continue the work with combining our different ideas in the group.

We want to find the exact game elements to implement in our application.

Find out how to use storytelling within games as a motivational tool.

We want to get more in-depth with both the problem and the concept itself.

Planning for some sort of appropriate concept testing such as quantitative/qualitative survey, interviews, focus group etc.

Challenges encountered:

Our previous design idea has changed and we are now working on an updated version for older users due to discussions in the group and feed-back from the mid-crit regarding the colors and layout off the presentation. This has led to a redesign and the development of a new approach to the overall design for the final presentation.

We have also experienced some difficulties in our attempt to focus our groups ideas to embrace the final result and so the common output of the project will be supported by all the groupmembers and so that our final outcome will be presented to the

Due to a common decision to leave some of the childish design aspects behind we have encountered some decision making problems for the creation of a mood-board on which we will rely on in our more ”Film Noir” – ish approach to the presentation.  

We also choosed to leave some of the information based game design elements for the storytelling approach in the previous work. We mention in the ”Changes in the project” a wish to better involve this in our design.

We have also been in mail-contact with Ingrid Severin:

Chef för Stadsmuseet Digitala enhet for some thoughtfull insight into what is going on in the development and future insight to the research work and

Changes in our project:

At the Rob Montgomery workshop we came up with an idea that we have developed during the weeks. Though the core idea is still the same, which was developed through the “Unsolved murder of Olof Palme”, we have made some changes in the project. We have discussed back and forth of how we are going to develop this idea even further into a more future perspective.

At the mid-crit session our project idea was that through AR-lences chase a fictinal suspect that has done a crime through the local streets where youre at. You can stop on different places to ask fictional witnesses for clues and to recieve clues to get one step closer to the suspect. You see the whole gaming-environment through your AR-lences and you intercat with your whole body in the game. After the mid-crit session we discussed how to further apply the feed-back we got from the jury. A change we are reconsidoring as we speak is to make the game more serious to better fit our target group. Earlier, we had the “chasing a suspect” approach which we thought was to childish. We wil also focus on the storytelling part more. And how storytelling activates gamers.

Starting now, we also focusing on our final presentation and how to present it visually:

• Get inspiration from other projects on youtube.
• Storyboard.
• Adaptation of the finished project.
• Edit, the final movie.

Resources:

State-of-the-art:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticproject.ingress

http://redrobot.com/games/life-is-crime/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.silvermoon.client

http://www.androidauthority.com/best-ar-apps-and-games-for-android-augmented-reality-584616/

Research on location based augmented reality:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10956-006-9037-z

http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/pc/2010/01/mpc2010010005.pdf

http://dbis.eprints.uni-ulm.de/1028/

Research on motivation:

https://brainmass.com/file/1346222/Gagne+and+Deci+Self-determinationTheory%5b1%5d.pdf

Research on motivation in games:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11423-006-9004-7

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-006-9051-8

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772

Litterature regarding our problem, the future and target group:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jan/02/25-predictions-25-years

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2202026/smartphones/25-ways-it-will-morph-in-the-next-25-years.html

http://www.soi2014.se/internets-spridning-har-inte-helt-stannat-upp/anvandning-av-internet/

http://www.soi2014.se/underhallning/alder-men-aven-utbildning-spelar-roll-for-hur-internet-anvands-for-underhallning/

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/cyber.2010.0260

Human Senses

Challenges encountered

Since the beginning of the project, we have had struggles to find the right angle, the right aspect to focus on. Human senses itself was clearly too broad, and using technologies triggering all of them at the same time turned out to be an over-kill. Defining a clear problem was also challenging: storytelling nowadays works - it is not really a problem that some senses are currently not included. We changed our target group from news journalism to advertisers because we thought that including senses would work best within a marketing perspective.

Change in our project

The feedback that we got after our mid-term presentation last Friday clearly showed us two things:

- our concept was not strong and clear enough.

- the possibilities of using smell in storytelling seemed especially appealing to the audience, since it is closely linked to memories.

Seeing how much interest the use of smell technologies caused, we all agreed to lay focus on this. In a ‚eureka‘-moment, we had an idea for a new concept…

What we have done

…that we then discussed further, added upon and finally agreed on a solution in form of a publishing app. Hereby we want to take into consideration both user sides: the one of the publisher and the one of the consumer. Here’s the summary of it:

Information overload has lead to a fight over attention, why the creation of an emotional bond with a story is easily lost. Our publishing app helps communicators tell their stories in a more engaging format, building on modern technologies that trigger different senses: It lets users enter text, sound, 3D pictures and smell (based on the oNotes technology).

It optimizes the story depending on the device that people consume it with. For example, when consumed on a smartwatch, the text could be read to the consumers, sounds and smells will be added, but pictures will be let out; When watched on a projector, more focus will lie on pictures, sound and smell; Etc.

What we will do

Our next steps are

• Getting some more feedback on this idea, since we changed it after the feedback from the mid-term crit
• Do personas of two or three potential users to develop a clearer picture of how this app would work and be used
• Start gathering ideas for the final presentation. As Matilda and Anna had mentioned the book ‚Regnet lukar inte här‘ we are considering this but need to put more thought into it.

Update Attention Span

This week we worked with incorporating the feedback from the mid-crit to our concept. According to Daniel’s recommendation, we decided to implement only one long 30-min version of our service in order to be more “daring”. We are still struggling to find an innovative and funny name for our service, we hope to agree on one next week. The feedback gave us really good indications about what should be made clearer and also how we are going to argue the justification of the aid organization involved in our business model.

We also set up a detailed project plan to better structure our work. Hence, in the next week we will

• Work on a new name and slogan
• Set up a meeting with Teresa and see how far she is with the content in order to integrate the story about Finnish war children
• Further work on our business model and especially see how we can argue the relevance of the involvement of an aid organization (which will be more clear with the cntext of our story, we hope)

The next steps will be working on the interface, create story lines and thing links, a video of the user experience to integrate in the final presentation and of course the final presentation and chapter.

Eyewitness Storytelling

Before the mid-crit we had an idea of a project based on a future scenario. Based on trends within the media industry and journalistic eyewitness-related work, we created a future in which we found some specific problems which we went about solving. This resulted in great feedback at the mid-crit presentation where we really felt that we understood where we wanted to go in the continuation of our project. More in detail, the feedback was about trying to view the future more optimistically, focus on distinguishing ourselves from the POV group, focus on what rather than why in association with eyewitness stories, simplify the extremely intricate deep learning algorithm concept, and more. Basically, they liked the presentation and some elements within it - but some things need revisiting and rethinking.

During this week we’ve taken the feedback from the mid-crit into consideration and continued developing the concept based on this. From the Swedish government’s study Medieutredningen we’ve been able to further distinguish what the future holds for media consumption, content creation, and distribution. From this research we can clearly state that there will be no journalists and journalistic work, as we see it today. All journalistic eyewitness content will be created by people in social media platforms. Here we see an opportunity to organize an abundance of unorganized shared information. Instead of having a deep learning algorithm determining whether or not some information is true or false, we create a concept in which an algorithm will create news from various sources of co-creation content in social media.

For now, we will continue developing the concept, further focusing on the visualization of the concept - and how it would be implemented in practice. Also, we will focus on understanding the future in which this algorithm would be present, rather than focusing on creating a company that sells this service. Since the idea is still at its early phase, even though we feel the background is solid (research on our future scenario), we will of course for the weeks to come also focus on fishing out the flaws and perfecting our idea. Malin! We would asap like to know how much and what to begin writing in the project text to be handed in in december.

Future of Advertising

What we have done

Before the mid-crit session we focused on defining the background to our concept and idea in order to get some early feedback on the course we were heading with the project. During the mid-crit session we got a lot of good feedback and comments to think about regarding our concept, especially that the ties between our idea and the concept of storytelling has to be stronger. We really think that we have a good background to the issues that we have to deal with, however, we have to continue working on making our concept clearer and connected to storytelling.

Challenges encountered

The biggest challenge that we have encountered is how to keep the balance in our project between storytelling and advertising, our first concept was mainly based around the future of advertising and not so much how future advertising techniques can support stronger storytelling. This is something that was further discussed and criticized at the feedback session, that we have to further connect our concept to storytelling.

Furthermore, we have encountered some time-management problems where some group members have been stressed out over how much time we should spend on the different parts of the project objectives (writing book chapter, refining the concept, making the presentation, making a design representation etc) as group members spend a lot of time on other mandatory activities outside the course. The solution was to make a very specific time-plan where deadlines of individual tasks of the project were set. The plan has made the individual parts of our project more manageable and we now know what we have to do every week in order to finish in time.

What we will do

During the next week we will continue working and researching our concept and to have a finished and refined concept that are clearly connected to storytelling before our internal Friday deadline.

Changes in the project

We have somewhat changed the course of our concept and idea around the future of Advertising. The main thing with the concept presented at the mid-crit was to make advertising more continuous over time, which is an aspect that we want to continue working on, but rather with the focus on human emotional responses to advertising. The idea is that all humans emotionally respond in different ways towards advertising, however, these emotions are often passing and not further built upon. By analyzing these emotions through future wearable’s, we believe that brand-value storytelling can be continuously conveyed throughout a person's every-day life and in contexts where advertising matter the most. As storytelling is a powerful tool of communicating brand-values, we believe that this concept really has potential, and is something that we will continue to work on during the next week.  

Cross Cultural Storytelling

What we have done. This week we have continued with our brainstorming process to address the critique we received last friday. The critique was mainly that we needed to define and narrow down our concept in more detail. To solve these issues we have discussed what we want to achieve by our service. For example, the question in whether our service should be a plug-in to an existing newspaper is not aligned with our goal of being a multi-subjective source, at the same time we want to be the “main” platform for news consumption. In the end, we agreed on the service being a platform, which publishes news from different news sites, where the reader can choose the preferred label in the home country. However, if the chosen newspaper should post biased news, the reader will be alerted with the “deviation alert” and will see the story told from other angles.

We have also started researching some about symbols and their meanings in different cultures as well as looking into Johan Bävman and his parental leave photos that different cultures had various opinions on according to the jury.

What we will do. For next week, we will divide work within the group, because we feel that we need to do more research from now on. We want to research technologies, user behavior when reading news, and information visualization to make it comprehensible. We also want to review the sources that were mentioned during the critique and see if we could conduct an expert interview with a journalist, or someone who has insight in biased news. Here is our to do list:

• Start with a business case 
• Specify the product/service 
• Summarize functions and features of the idea - technologies? 
• Create product identity 
• Research how we will consume news in the future & how we consume news today 
• Research icons/symbols meanings in cultures, colours in different cultures. 
• Make contact with Point of View group and Eye Witness group to check their ideas and maybe get inspiration. 
• Search for articles written in “different ways” due to different cultures to use as example during presentation.

Challenges encountered. Right now the challenges are to limit our scope and decide how our service will be designed in a good way to achieve the desired goals. As a group, we feel like we are communicating better now than in the beginning and have started to work more efficiently.


Changes in the project. We don’t have many changes in the project this week yet, since we hadn’t decided exactly how our project would look until last week. Since the jury seemed to like our presentation and idea, we will continue to develop it even more. We will focus on doing more research to see, if our ideas are possible or if we have to change some parts of the project until next week.

Resources. We have used the two websites Omni news and Recordedfuture to get inspiration and we will continue to research more during the next week. Further research is needed to narrow down the concept and make the solution “clearer”. In order to also use more examples of articles written in different ways due to different cultures as mentioned above we’ve also read through Johan Bävmans (SvD) article considering parental leave.  

Computer Games

What we have done: Since we changed our focus completely (from using computer games as a teaching tool in schools, to computer games based on reality) this week has been dedicated to research about the topic. The reason we changed the topic was because we had trouble moving forward on our previous concept, we felt like the ideas we had was not that fun and there were a lot of problems that we got stuck on. We all felt like computer games based on reality was a much more fun topic.

We are sure to stick with the Chernobyl disasters as the story. We found some really cool documentaries that we could be inspired by when developing our concept. We have also thought about the concept more deeply, how the game would actually look like and ways of presenting it at the final presentation. We decided it might be a good idea to use print screens from other games, documentaries and also producing small comics that illustrates our ideas. We thought that one long movie to illustrate our game might not be suitable because it is very hard to know how to structure such a video.

A background check has been done to find out what games based on reality there are out there. We found some but they are often based on violence (for example war games). We feel like we could make a game based on reality where the personal story and storytelling is in focus rather than just make the excitement based on violence.

While the game is based on reality it is necessary to use some fiction in it when developing the main plot and the characters. The plot, environment and characters will be inspired by real data that we gathered to make the game trustworthy and believable as a medium to tell a real story for everyone. This is a challenge for us. How can we tell the real story while still having the option of choice? We feel like we want to develop a game where there are choices because we feel like a game without choices might as well be a movie.  We thought about a game where your decisions in the game leads to different scenarios but the outcome is more or less the same, because there is only so much you can do to influence the outcome.

What we will do: We have to decide what material we want to base the concept on. We also have some gathering of information left. We are investigating a game called Stalker where we hope to be able to gather information such as print screens that might be suitable for illustrating our own game concept. We are also gathering information and pictures from Chernobyl before the event, which seems to be somewhat hard to find. Next Tuesday we plan on consulting Björn Thuresson to get some feedback on our ideas. The plot of the game i not yet done and that is one thing we have to work out in detail. Then we have to figure out how to present our ideas.

The main challenges for us seems to be to visualize how a presentation would look like where it is understandable what we are doing as well as exiting. There is also a lot of work left on working out our concepts in detail.

Right now we feel like we are progressing and we feel like we have what it takes to move further 

Resources.  Fortunately there are a lot of great documentaries about the Chernobyl disaster that we can use for inspiration. We feel like it could be great to base a story upon a documentary since where are a lot of visual feedback that we then could use for illustration of our concept. Examples of some great documentaries that we found:

Chernobyl Uncensored documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS3WvKKSpKI
Surviving Disaster documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njTQaUCk4KY