Trajectories: a conceptual framework for complex user experiences
Artists working at the cutting edge of interactive
experience design are creating new kinds of user experience that embed computers
into extended physical sets and timescales and that address multiple
performance roles. These kinds of novel experience may provide glimpses of
future more mainstream cultural applications.
Trajectories is a new conceptual
framework that captures the idea of establishing a coherent journey through an
extended experience that combines many different spaces, times, roles and
interfaces. Trajectories involve different kinds of transitions and traversals
that may occur throughout an experience. Canonical and participant trajectories
capture the tension between pre-scripted narrative and interactivity.
Diverging, converging and crossing trajectories reflect important aspects of
multi-user experiences.
The trajectories framework has emerged from reflections
on more than ten years experience of collaborating with artists, most notably
Blast Theory, to create, tour and study a series of
interactive artworks and performances. It is also driven by an
interdisciplinary collaboration with Gabriella
Giannachi from Drama Studies at Exeter University.
The framework aims to provide sensitizing concepts to
guide empirical studies, provide a structure for distilling craft design knowledge,
identify requirements for new technologies, and ultimately underpin a new
dramaturgy of interactive performance.
A full account of the trajectories framework will be
published in the book Performing Mixed Reality (Benford and Giannachi) by MIT
Press in July 2011.
I am also able to run a full-day workshop on applying
the framework to different kinds of experience, using a format that was first
run at the 2020
Digital Futures conference.
Feel free to make use of the following resources as
part of your research and teaching:
CHI 2009 paper giving an overview
of the trajectories framework
Powerpoint presentation of the trajectories framework
Previous CHI 2008 paper introducing temporal
trajectories for shared interactive narratives
Published studies and videos of previous experiences
that underpin the trajectories framework:
Desert Rain study from CHI
2001
Uncle Roy All Around You study from CHI 2006
Uncle
Roy All Around You documentary video
Fairground: Thrill
Laboratory study from CHI 2008
Fairground:
Thrill Laboratory documentary video
Day of the
Figurines study from CSCW 2008
Day
of the Figurines documentary video