Panel Statement
Panel: The Madness of Methods: Emerging Arts Research Practices
Media convergence in the form of transmedia storytelling franchises that distribute content across multiple platforms is a growing field of inquiry in media studies. A perspective of interdisciplinary design enables us to also investigate the emerging convergence of user experience across different media. This paper traces a common logic of experience design that informs the hybrid transmedia objects that are theme parks, digital games, public art pieces, and museums. This is the logic of the toy city, the community of attractions that operates at the juncture of the material and the digital, the spectacular and the interactive, to create a signature experience for the user that defies medium specific modes of feeling, knowing, and creating. Case studies highlight the ways in which these media phenomena operate on three levels, as affective objects, as technological devices, and as imaginative worlds.
- Lauren Fenton is a designer/scholar whose practice focuses on creating narratives that can be accessed through interactions with the textures of real space and the manipulation of enticing objects. She thinks of her practice as a process of theorizing and inventing new emotions for people to experience, through an everyday encounter with design objects. Her work includes an award-winning multimedia storytelling experience with a tangible interface (The Interactive GeoSurface Map, with the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Onomy Labs), and the design of themed spaces, video installations, and animated short films.