I wrote my master thesis about transmedia and literature using an explorative approach where I researched how to push the novel further. I used my own unpublished novel Sand to do this, and worked with several different media to test how to best push that specific narrative into a new setting.

The work really started out with a project me and Amanda Reyes did with the publishing company Ramus during one of our courses which focused on Advanced Themes in interaction design such as place centric computing and service design. To read more about that project, visit the project site. The site is in Swedish.

During that project we tried to find spaces where the reading experience would be enhanced by looking at for example primary qualities of reading.

During this work i grew fascinated with these primary qualities and how to accomodate for these in a world of new types of storytelling, and so I chose to work with literary fiction and transmedia for my thesis. If you want to read my thesis it is available as a pdf on this site, although it is not registered yet, and therefore can not be used as an academic reference. If you have questions, feel free to contact me about it.

Me and Transmedia

My hope is to be able to work with transmedia related design projects, finding out ways to express multiplatform narratives both with the tech we have today as well as what can be done tomorrow. As an interaction designer, now is very much entangled with future.

For me the work is as much an end product as an exploration of possibilities. The process is as important as anything else. During my work I for example conducted a workshop, had my main character do cameo-appearances and so on.

Spatial exhibition

As part of the thesis we also did a spatial exhibition piece, there is a short movie from that.

I chose to make a visual representation of my thesis, since I did only a theoretical last prototype. I did this to give the viewer a feeling for what I had done and what conclusions I’ve reached rather than presenting them with a “here it is”.

I used one of the tables at Medea Malmö - the research unit where I wrote my thesis, where I wrote out the story in red paper bits of different texture. I used the different textures to emphasize that a story consists of many different pieces of information. To add the element of transmedia to it, I exchanged some of the paper bits for cut outs of photographs, symbols for music as well as controls for audio and video playing and recording. I also put in pieces of written text, (small enough to be unreadable, so that they would be a symbol rather than actual text) to show that text as a medium also were a part of this. There was an MP3 player containing music added to the side of the table, so that the participant could listen to it while exploring, to add an extra layer of story to the exploration for the participant.

After viewing the piece on the ground the participant were invited to watch the whole thing from above by walking up some stairs, from up there the text was readable and symbols more obvious, to emphasize that a full story universe might not be comprehendible until the reader is on the outside again.

Throughout the piece there was text included, telling short snippets from the thesis.