Interactive Dramaturgies: New Approaches in Multimedia Content and Design

Interactive Dramaturgies, with its influences from the performing arts, are concerned with the conceptions, structural features, and formative designs of interactive multimedia for e-learning within intercultural contexts, museum applications, games, and edutainment, which may include interactive films and television formats. This book, excellent in its choice of authors, presentation and illustrations, examines interlinked topics that include visual language and interface design, methods of conceptualizing human– machine communication and interactions which break with linear narrative traditions. The first section outlines the history of different narrating and artistic traditions leading to a discussion of the roles of drama in education that communicate not merely content, but affect and empathy. A provoking chapter examines the sense in which computers can be considered to be interactive, and argues for a dialogic medium that can encourage and support creativity. Case studies in the arts and sciences are discussed where the influence of cultural settings is also important as is the need to foster interest and interpretative skills. These accounts provide insights into the designers’ thoughts and feelings as they interrelate content with the various presentational forms and structures e.g. designing for re-reading and revisioning, navigational models that use icons within temporal and spatial frameworks and attempt to link images and content into a ‘design for experience’. Museums also face problems as they seek to present their materials and assets in ways that excite interest and promote understanding to a general audience. Practical examples are taken showing the advantages of bottom-up designs focused on the perceived needs of users and where the audiences provide inputs and judgments in their exploratory searches. Hence an interactive learning environment is created which invites reflection and a re-visiting of the materials. Other innovative projects have developed three-dimensional virtual work and play spaces using video projectors/ cameras and techniques that combine horizontal and vertical projection surfaces. Case studies include gaming, physics experiments, mapping and model building. But the main interest is how these techniques have increased the range and type of interactive activities that can move beyond the desktop. Interaction is further developed in applications with film and television that use polyscreen formats. The split-screen grid has logical/spatial links to provide scenarios where users can change or constrain events and influence narrative streams in ways that are coherent. The difficulties encountered in story creation, scenario management and interaction control are well discussed as is the way such enterprises (where users are active participants), are organized. The last section examines the design and the conceptions involved in interactive multimedia programs that include narrative structures, navigational techniques, visual language elements and metaphors incorporating different models of interactivity. This book of two-columned 200 pages, well referenced and with many case studies, is sub-titled ‘new approaches in multimedia content and design’. Its range of ideas and the quality of discussion recommend that it should be placed within the reach of all researchers, designers and teachers who are interested in the educational potential of interactive media.