As Arnie said in Terminator I'll be back. And we are back for another semester with IXD304 where we will be looking at story telling through design and through the use of art direction, pacing and narrative all control how the story flows from start to finish

1. Art direction is all about evoking the correct emotions with the reader and creating a connection to what you are seeing or reading.
2. Pacing is the speed at which The story goes. This is all determined by the scenes and how fast the action. Like my good friend above Arnold, the terminator movies would be fast paced action movies as there is car chases, gun fights and fist fights thatcarry the audeince along at a very fast pace.
3. Narrative is a story that that has been written or told in great detail to an intended audience. It can be poetry, song, theatre, movies or series. Often the narrative will include the entire story and not just the important details

We discussed what the deliverables of this module will be, the first one is an immersive prototype that considers all micro and macro interactions and the second deliverable is a website or ebook that will include a good use of typography. All the while documenting research and showing the process of how I get from start to finish.

Apple are masters of telling stories as when you go onto their site too look at an iPhone or Mac or any other apple product they tell you everything about it from what it looks like, what it does, the specs of it, for the phones they show you a video of how good the camera is. But its through the use of subtle animations that get you hooked on the product and makes you wanna buy it. Although they don't tell you a story in the original sense through a book, they tell it through images and animation and text.

In the lecture we discussed what we would be doing throughout the semester. And we have been tasked with first creating a prototype and then a website or an ebook all about Sherlock Holmes and all the characters in it. The first task we have been given was to create a mood board around Sherlock Holmes. As I am a big movie fan I have decided to come at it from the movies made about Holmes including my favourite starting Robert Downey Junior. I will look at colours, themes, images, typography so I can get an idea of how I can theme my project.

Cindy Chastain - Thinking Like a Storyteller

I just finished listening to the Thinking like a Storyteller talk by Cindy Chastain and I found it interesting as i discovered that there is a lot of similarities between interaction design and storytelling. As at the start of the talk she shows a few tweets that talk about how storytelling is important when you are describing a solution to a client as you wanna take them on a journey of how you came up with the idea and why you think this idea will solve their problem in the best possible way. Another tweet talks about how story telling is an essential component of IXD which Cindy then goes on to talk about how when we are designing we created user stories or user personas that tell a story of your user so you can better understand who you are designing for. She talks about how user narrative can be in everything we do as people sometimes will talk to our selves as we do it thus creating our own personal narrative to doing that task.

Cindy talks about how there are different things we can learn from the discipline of storytelling that will help us design as we can use different story telling techniques like slow disclosure leading to a surprise that engages the user cognitively and emotionally. The example she uses is from the spaghetti western movie The Good The Bad and The Ugly where is shows two men looking at another man all with stern looks on their faces and as they get closer to each other your wondering who are they, whats gonna happen or you start making assumptions that one of them is gonna shoot the other but as they get near each other you realise they are on the same team as they go into a saloon guns blazing. This shows us that stories engage us bu the way they are designed.

Cindy then shows a slide on how stories can be told in two different ways either by narrative/telling which is where you describe how the user uses something. The second way is dramatic/showing which is where a story is told through song or a stage show. Later in the talk Cindy talks about how all stories have a beginning middle and an end, the story will also have a dramatic incident and then a climax before the end. In interactive products the user is also a character who preforms actions in a series of events. She talks about how task flows that designers create can be seen as a story as they are a series of events that show how the user will flow through a product almost like a story.

When listening to think I started thinking about how I have created my own narrative flows while online shopping:

Beginning - In the beginning of my online narrative flow I would find the site I wanna buy something off.

Middle - I would then find the product that I want

Climax - The climax would be me buying the product