Design Process
Across all my courses, I'm moving towards a consistent process for design projects. It focuses on DRAMATIC ENGAGEMENT.
It starts with identifying the emotion or tone you want your person (the term I use because "user" seems wrong) to feel. There might be one main emotion, or a sequence of emotions in a journey or an arc. Even if it it is within one emotion, there should be movement, and change, unless the experience is the equivalent of an Imagist poem, like my audiovisual and kinetic virtual installation Ice Opal (made in Second Life, 2011). That experience is about a fusion of opposites.
So, you start with the emotion, and then quickly draw a roller coaster diagram of the "ride" of the experience you are creating for your person. Every cultural artifact has a ride. Some are almost effortless for your person, like the smooth ride of Classical Hollywood Cinema, with continuity editing and invisible style that keeps you inside the diegetic world of the film. A self-reflexive movie like Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) or Inception (2010), or Deadpool (2016)/Deadpool 2 (2018), reminds you that you are watching a movie, inviting or baiting you to notice and admire its artfulness or simply its artifice. It might be a bumpier ride: you feel the road, have to switch gears manually, and maybe you even get lost and have to turn around, or ask for directions. Self-reflexive film shades into interactive narrative media. The engagement and active meaning-making it takes to watch and understand Memento is considerable, and although you don't have the kind of agency you do in an interactive fiction like Galatea, the interactive Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, or the current most popular game Fortnite, it sure is different than watching a modern Hollywood movie like Die Hard (1988).
Decide what kind of ride you're giving your person. You can have a smooth scary ride, or a bumpy, weird joyful one. They may both be disturbing and unsettling, because style and content are not the same, although they should be united in creating an intended effect.
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| Dramatic Engagement Design Steps 1-4 , Lori Landay |
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| Dramatic Engagement Design Step 5, Lori Landay |
It starts with identifying the emotion or tone you want your person (the term I use because "user" seems wrong) to feel. There might be one main emotion, or a sequence of emotions in a journey or an arc. Even if it it is within one emotion, there should be movement, and change, unless the experience is the equivalent of an Imagist poem, like my audiovisual and kinetic virtual installation Ice Opal (made in Second Life, 2011). That experience is about a fusion of opposites.
So, you start with the emotion, and then quickly draw a roller coaster diagram of the "ride" of the experience you are creating for your person. Every cultural artifact has a ride. Some are almost effortless for your person, like the smooth ride of Classical Hollywood Cinema, with continuity editing and invisible style that keeps you inside the diegetic world of the film. A self-reflexive movie like Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) or Inception (2010), or Deadpool (2016)/Deadpool 2 (2018), reminds you that you are watching a movie, inviting or baiting you to notice and admire its artfulness or simply its artifice. It might be a bumpier ride: you feel the road, have to switch gears manually, and maybe you even get lost and have to turn around, or ask for directions. Self-reflexive film shades into interactive narrative media. The engagement and active meaning-making it takes to watch and understand Memento is considerable, and although you don't have the kind of agency you do in an interactive fiction like Galatea, the interactive Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, or the current most popular game Fortnite, it sure is different than watching a modern Hollywood movie like Die Hard (1988).
Decide what kind of ride you're giving your person. You can have a smooth scary ride, or a bumpy, weird joyful one. They may both be disturbing and unsettling, because style and content are not the same, although they should be united in creating an intended effect.
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