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The Current State of Interactive Documentary

jswan — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:47:57 +0000

Miriam Simun

What is the future of storytelling?

This question is being asked a lot these days. The availability of new tools and new media strategies have brought about many experiments in storytelling. Whether incorporating social media, gaming, augmented reality, audience participation, or transmedia narratives, various elements are being pieced together in different ways to create new experiences. I recently attended a two talks at MOMA about the current state of Interactive Documentaries — specifically, documentaries native to the web.

Part I of “A Field Guide to the Interactive Documentary,” was hosted by Zach Wise, the multimedia producer responsible for much of the innovative work at The New York Times. The two projects Wise showed really stood out: Johnny Cash Project, which creates an ever evolving music video from over 250,000 (and counting) user contributions, and the NYT’s “A Year at War” project, which enables visitors to navigate their own journey through a breadth of video content, articles, and original documentation to learn about the stories of the U.S. military at war in Afghanistan.

Field Frogger: A Hoppin’ Good Time

admin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:22:01 +0000

Pete Vigeant

ESI’s Game Lab has been experimenting with public event-based gaming over the past two years. Our portfolio has grown to include over a dozen new and unique experiences that experiment with scale, narrative, behavior and technology augmentation.

We decided to bring Field Frogger—our most ambitious game yet—to debut at the Come Out & Play Festival in San Francisco this past month. The arcade game “Frogger” was released thirty years ago and still lives on today—on the Nintendo 3DS, iPhone and Android devices (among other platforms). Our designers were inspired by the original arcade game and spent two months imagining, testing and plotting an authentic real-world reenactment. The result was an amazingly fun and captivating event that has never been done before.

Creating Conference Interaction with XGame at Xlab

admin — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:18:13 +0000

Ericka Hedgecock

Last week, ESI hosted two cool public gaming events: XGame, a multiplayer collaborative game for SEGD’s Xlab 2011: The Design of Location at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, and Field Frogger, our live-action version of the beloved arcade game at Come Out & Play San Francisco. These two games follow in the footsteps of award-winning ESI games at Come Out & Play New York and Steel City Games Fest in Pittsburgh. I’m going to focus on Xlab here and Pete will tell us more about Field Frogger in an upcoming post.

The power of games is manifold. Aside from inspiring general fun and delight, games can provide an environment for collaboration and community, connect us to our emotions, abilities and behaviors, and create a forum for public interaction and dialogue. In the case of Xlab, our goals were to create a game that would encourage new kinds of interaction between Xlab participants, extend the discussion around conference themes and topics, and provide a new platform for networking.

Peopling of America Center opens at Ellis Island

admin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:38:31 +0000

Samantha Hoover

It’s always thrilling to see Lady Liberty up close, even for this jaded New Yorker. I must admit it’s rare that I get the chance, but I did at the Statue of Liberty’s 125^th birthday celebration on October 28th. The event—which included marching bands, politicians, celebrities, and, of course, fireworks—also commemorated the opening of the Peopling of America Center at Ellis Island, which was designed by ESI and marks an important milestone in our long-term collaboration with the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.

Designing Interdependent Systems to Course-Correct the World

admin — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:31:53 +0000

Gideon D’Arcangelo

“Almost one billion people are living in the informal settlements, commonly called slums. This population is projected to swell to two billion by 2030.” A staggering statistic at the heart of the Cooper-Hewitt’s Design With the Other 90%: CITIES exhibit on display at the United Nations Visitor Center until January 9, 2012. This show expands on the 2007 show, Design For the Other 90%. While that show focused on objects that can change the world, this show focuses on systems. That makes it a harder story to communicate, but curator Cynthia Smith and the exhibit team have put in a valiant effort to tell these complex and interwoven stories of intervention.

Community mapping projects and bootstrapped SMS census-taking are initial themes of the exhibit, pointing out that it is exceedingly difficult to intervene among the uncounted and unseen. After this, affordable housing is front and center, from ingeniously inexpensive durable building materials to complex infrastructure plays. “Incremental Housing” from Chile is a prime example of this. This a program of half-built houses – spines of residential infrastructure that include kitchen, bathrooms, basic structure – while residents are responsible for building out the rest in their idiosyncratic ways. The net value of the property is significantly raised by the sweat equity of the residents.

Takeaways from "Act Locally/Think Globally" Symposium

admin — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:58:00 +0000

Ericka Hedgecock

If there is one key takeaway from this year's Society for Environmental Graphic Design Exhibition and Experience Design Symposium it was this:

Work your networks.

Starting or expanding your business abroad is a complex, if not daunting, endeavor. Developing a network of international partners, fabricators, vendors, and resources requires trust and faith – trust in the value of your ability and services, and faith that you can work together to produce your vision to exceed the expectations established between you and your client. How and where to start?

Held annually since 2004 at the extraordinary Cranbrook Academy of Art, the 2011 Symposium topic was "Act Locally/ Think Globally". SEGD is a global community of people working at the intersection of communication design and the built environment. In addition to a robust conference and workshop schedule, SEGD provides advanced learning and leadership to a community of 1,600 members. This year's symposium brought valuable insight into the challenges and opportunities of establishing yourself in the international marketplace. Below are highlights from our discussions:

The Spy Did It

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:41:08 +0000

Pete Vigeant

On July 16, a large group of relative strangers came together and shared a unique and positive experience. The annual gathering known as Come Out and Play brought the large field on Governor’s Island to life with a diverse series of physical and mental games that spanned the entire beautiful day and challenged participants to open their minds to new, sometimes goofy, adventures.

ESI Design entered our Live Action Spy Party into the mix, a non-digital version of Chris Hecker’s experimental video game about artificial intelligence and espionage. The game features a Spy trying to accomplish three discrete tasks without being detected by an ever-watching Sniper. The rest of the players act as decoys, performing the playful actions and reactions prescribed on their instruction cards. Live Action Spy Party is a blast to play whatever the role, because there’s always something to do and see, but observers get the extra special treat of watching the performance and trying to identify the Spy themselves.

User Research for Carnegie Learning: Don’t Forget to Do Your Homework!

admin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:20:53 +0000

James Tu

In the fall of 2009, Carnegie Learning, a leading publisher of innovative, research-based math curricula, approached ESI to help them create an engaging and appealing design for math software and textbooks for middle school students. We recently completed our work on this new product; it was officially announced by Carnegie Learning today. As a lead designer on the project, I wanted to share the user research we conducted to demonstrate how it fueled our creative process and helped us create an engaging learning experience.

Most students will likely tell you that math is not their favorite subject. (There are many reasons for this and hopefully STEM will help change this, but we won’t delve into that here). So, we set out to discover the things that middle school kids do like.

The Motion

admin — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:21:48 +0000

Pete Vigeant

Two major hardware releases that have recently promised to radically change the game market are the PlayStation Move and the Xbox Kinect. Each of these devices offers a high degree of interactive gaming, but in different ways (we have both set up in competing rooms here at ESI!).

The PlayStation Move is not, as naysayers profess, a glorified Wii-mote. The integration of a camera and sophisticated onboard sensors allow for very accurate motion detection, as well as an augmented reality view of the players. Kids seem to love it. I watched my 8-year-old cousin play Start the Party on her PlayStation 3 and she giggled with delight at seeing herself holding the objects used in the game (such as a mallet, a fly swatter and a flashlight). Interestingly enough, she never had to ask how to play – the system immediately engaged her with games that were obvious and intuitive. The accuracy of the motion sensors during more complex activities, such as Table Tennis, is also yet unmatched by any other simulation.

The Xbox Kinect offers a departure from the controller entirely and feels a bit like magic. The experience is unlike any other in all of gaming and cannot be compared to the Move, the Wii or any other motion-based device. One of the major advantages of Kinect is that the player uses his or her entire body to control the game. Players can simply walk into the play space and immediately take control without a complicated setup.

TEDxBrooklyn: One Moves Many

anewland — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 18:54:58 +0000

Ariel Newland

TED launched TEDx as a platform for people around the globe “to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.” With events from Kibera to Amsterdam, TEDx came to Brooklyn for the first time over the weekend. The event centered on the idea of “one moves many” or the making of a movement.

As the New Yorker magazine put it "naturally, Brooklyn, a hotbed of freethinkers, is having its own [TEDx] get-together.” So what is it about Brooklyn these days? It’s New York City’s most populous borough with roughly 2.5 million inhabitants. The affordability, amenities, community and beauty have attracted a strong creative class—from artists and designers to writers and inventors—to live and work in the borough. At ESI, nearly half of our staff lives in Brooklyn!

Here are some of the highlights of impressive Brooklynites from TEDxBrooklyn:

Swoon