Exam Project

For the exam project I’ve decided to look into something which I’ve been interested in for a while – interactive narrative. For the Design for Interaction project – www.interactwithme.co.uk, I created an Adobe Flash interface which attempted to explore the roles of control within interaction and tried to reverse these roles, making the interface difficult to interact with. In contrast, for this project I would like to explore the way in which narrative can be changed and randomised through interaction to create a piece which is potentially interesting and engaging.

I have been interested and researched many aspects of how the brain functions over the course of the year. For the Design Futures project (www.sensorysubstitution.co.uk) I looked into Sensory Substitution and the way in which our senses relay information to the brain and how the plasticity of the brain can allow the substitution of one sensory input for another. For the Design for Interaction (www.interactwithme.co.uk) project I investigated perception and the way we see and interpret information as well as optical illusions and how these are interpreted by the brain. Also, for the previous project, the D&AD Student Awards (www.dandad.lucyirving.com), I researched Dementia and brain injuries and a condition called Agnosia, a term coined by Freud in his book Aphasia to describe recognition and perception disorders. I would like to continue to research into brain functions, and this time I have chosen to research into the way in which the brain constructs dreams, using this as a basis for my narrative exploration and construction within my final piece.

I am considering creating a questionnaire to allow me to do some primary research into what people remember about how their dreams are constructed and the way in which a narrative is constructed within their dreams. I am however having difficulty thinking of the questions I could ask to obtain this information, so I really need to sit down and work out whether it would be possible and/or useful to create a questionnaire. Anyway, here’s a nice illustration of a brain I did a while ago to keep you amused: