Interaction and immersive theatre
Empathize, Define
With the goal of creating an interactive theater experience in mind, I researched about user interaction and general design for interactive theater plays and art installations. I also looked for inspiration from existing plays to better understand how these installations and plays function and identify elements that could enhance the user's experience as well as gaining insights into the design process and other important guidelines.
I used the Evernote app to keep track of all my research notes.
While the idea of an interactive theatre play wasn't something new, the way I envisioned our concept and from what we discussed amongst ourselves, we imagined something quite unique that hasn't really been done before. That's why, when looking for interactive theatre plays, most of them followed more traditional approaches. The user was either being given a background character role where his actions were quite limited thus reducing the possibility of having a significant impact within the play itself, merely acting more as an observer while moving around the laid out space of the play. Or in another case, the play was transformed into a detective game, where users had the role of judges that had to find the culprit in a murder mystery case. The whole "play" was in a digital format being related to the users through a personal tablet by means of story parts, videos, clues, etc.
In our case, the nature of a hybrid concept where we aimed to combine users interacting and collaborating in a physical space while being a given a impactful role within the play with a digital representation of the play's world and characters as well as integrating AI technology for the purpose of storytelling and user interaction proved to be quite a difficult combination to achieve and balance out.
Based on my research, I ended up drawing out some applicable guidelines to follow when further designing our interactive play and its step-by-step moments.
Focus on and create moments for social interactions among multiple players
Educate and guide users about their role within the play and the "game rules" in a non-obtrusive manner; Use simple rules and explanations in order to not confuse the users and all of them are on the same page
Limit the amount of time for the player's answers in order maintain a good story flow as well as assisting the users if needed through a more back and forth approach between them and the involved actors
Improv from the actors is vital for advancing the story and adapting to the answers of the users
The narrative structure of the theatre performance needs to be manageable by the actors and further maintained by a group of authors; Usually a narrative that doesn't branch out and always goes back to the main thread is easier to handle
Story and moment to moment design
Ideate, Prototype
After discussing with the team and the client, on how to handle the story for the play, we came to the conclusion that diving too deep into the script writing aspect would be quite difficult for us to do as we do not have the expertise and knowledge that people from the theatre industry have. Furthermore, the story was also subject to change later on as the project advances in theatre's development time for it. As such, we decided that our contribution on this would rather be to outline a possible approach for the narrative that could be used as a starting point for the in-person testing that will happen in Oslo.
As we previously settled on the idea of driving the story based on the somewhat philosophical and complex questions that we're provided to us by the client, I aimed on expanding the main questions into sets of more specific sub-questions that could be used to either help the users answer the main question or further drive discussion. As it can be seen in the diagram, the play would be made out of approximately 6 questions each question having 3 additional sub-questions. The main issue with this structure would be the amount of time that each question would have in the play, considering the pace and additional improv moments that are being done. As a result, it is necessary to further test how much is it needed for each questions, should all questions be used as well how does ChatGPT answer to those different questions and/or create counter arguments to the user's answers.
Comentarios