Gabriele Ferri

Analyzing critical designs: categories, distinctions, and canons of exemplars

The use of design as a critical tool to explore designs potential roles in society and the future has emerged as a trend in HCI and design research, but several questions remain open. How can we explain and teach how criticality can be applied to design? How can we assess, compare and give context to critical designs? How should we understand the relationships among practices that bear affinities to critical design, such as speculative design or critical engineering? We argue that many of these issues would be clarified if the HCI and design research communities had a collection of examples that exemplified not just critical design in general, but also its major genres, styles, historical trends, rhetorics, and other distinctions. As a first step in this direction, we detail our efforts to develop a more systematic vocabulary to talk about critical design. After assembling a small operative corpus from a wider inventory of critical designs, we apply poststructuralist semiotic theory to propose a number of analytic distinctions and concepts that could be used-along with others like them-to more systematically and deliberately construct a canon of exemplars and a more mature conceptual vocabulary for critical design.

First Steps towards a Unified Theory for Interactive Digital Narrative

As the domain of Interactive Digital Narrative matures, it becomes increasingly important for researchers to understand the conceptual differences and underlying theories in the different approaches. This paper presents new theoretical perspectives on the fragmented theory and practice within the domain and proposes first steps towards a unified theoretical framework for the domain. The paper is informed by the discussions between theorists and practitioners at two workshops held by the authors.

Mapping the Evolving Space of Interactive Digital Narrative - From Artifacts to Categorizations

Categorizing Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) works is challenging because artistic and technological approaches constantly evolve. At the same time, a range of theoretical approaches from neo-Aristotelian perspectives to applications of post-classical narratology have applied many markedly different analytical perspectives, making an overall comparison difficult. This position paper expresses the need for novel, dynamic and multidimensional mappings and explores an early selection of categorizations for IDN works across different approaches.

Games as Strong Concepts for City-Making

Cities are becoming increasingly complex, both in terms of their social and cultural context, and in the technological solutions that are necessary to make them function. In parallel, we are observing a growing attention toward the public dimension of design, addressing societal challenges and opportunities at an urban scale. Conceptualizing, ideating, and framing design problems at a larger scale may still prove challenging, even as cities are becoming more and more relevant for all branches of design. In this chapter, we address the use of game mechanics to produce strong concepts for better understanding complex problems in city-making and communal participation, capitalizing on the necessity to shift the attention from smart cities to smart citizens. Through several examples we will show that games and play have a special quality of social bonding, providing context and motivational aspects that can be used to improve the dynamics and solutions within city-making.

Do We Need a New Narratology for Interactive Digital Storytelling? A Workshop on Theory at ICIDS 2009

The workshop explores Narratology as applied to Interactive Digital Storytelling. It presents different strands in established Narratology and the foundations they are built on. Then it discusses different attempts to apply and reconcile Narratology with Interactive Digital Storytelling. The workshop is designed to expose these differences by applying different concepts to the analysis of different digital artifacts and open up a discussion of theory that is mindful of diverse approaches and integrates practical considerations.

Satire, Propaganda, Play, Storytelling. Notes on Critical Interactive Digital Narratives

Paolo Pedercini, better known through his Molleindustria alter-ego, is a game designer specializing in social critique through apparently simple casual video games - uniting digital storytelling, game-based mechanics with the discursive genres of satire and propaganda. This work examines three recent pieces - Oiligarchy, Phone Story and Tax Evaders - to explore how the affordances of interactive digital storytelling overlap with critical and political discourse.

Towards a Shared Vocabulary for Interactive Digital Storytelling

As a new research domain matures, it becomes increasingly important for researchers to agree on a shared vocabulary. For researchers in Interactive Digital Storytelling, this is a particular challenge, because researchers come from many different domains and bring their own terminology with them. This workshop exposes and explores the differences in meaning and terminology of key terms such as “story” in different academic disciplines related to Interactive Digital Storytelling. In order to minimize confusion and misunderstandings in the academic discussion within the field and with outside disciplines, the workshop explores ways towards a shared vocabulary for Interactive Digital Storytelling.

Towards a unified theory for interactive digital storytelling - classifying artifacts: a workshop at ICIDS 2011

An important step towards a theoretical understanding of interactive digital narrative is a classification system for existing artifacts. Many artifacts in Interactive Digital Storytelling provide a challenge to taxonomies derived from literature or film. The lack of a thorough classification system is also a serious hindrance to theoretical work, as it precludes a mapping of the overall field and a comparison of artifacts along categories shared by many researchers. In order to minimize confusion and misunderstandings in the academic discussion within the field and with outside disciplines, the workshop explored ways towards a shared taxonomy for Interactive Digital Storytelling.

Making sense of a game: a preliminary sketch for a semantic approach to games

In this paper a semiotic approach to video games will be presented. Structuralist semiotic notion of text will be criticized for being unable to account for the nonlinear and unstable nature of interactive ludic objects, and Rastiers [9]paradigm will be adopted. Integrating it with recent proposals in semantic of perception [4], a sketch for a semantic and semiotic analytic methodology for computer games will be outlined. Such methodology will be field-tested on the computer game flOw [1].

Touchscreen Poetry: Analyzing Gestural Digital Poems

Interactive Poetry is a lively genre within E-Lit and interactive digital narrative that was made more accessible by the diffusion of tablets with “multitouch” screens allowing relatively complex gestural UIs on consumer-level hardware. This paper leverages pragmatist aesthetics to critically interrogate three exemplar pieces (Strange Rain, What They Speak When They Speak to Me? and Vniverse) that produce poetic effects by inviting gestural interactions. In conclusion, two critical concepts (“isomorphism” and “heteromorphism”) are demonstrated for future design and research.