Storied Experiences: Investing in Culture

This talk presents a new design perspective of time-based interactivity and expression, which Lee calls “Storied Experiences”. This discourse referred to as “storiedness”, explores how objects-and-systems no longer serve as functional tools that mediate human goals and expression, but can be a source for reflection and appreciation. Storiedness provides foundation that can shift their stance from being a resource for information and activity to become a source for understanding and expectation. Storiedness transforms the stark, experiential attitude between person-to-data points/teller-to-listener to an audience-to-audience two-way partnership. It requires that the role of the audience to be both a creator and listener in their engagement, where the re-play value for each experience becomes desirable.

In designing storied experiences, Lee uses examples from her research to show how situating point-of-view, experiential compression of time, and the privileging of extraordinary over ordinary events within a collection of records are critical. An extensive example, the “Audio Time-Lapse Bench”, uses story construction methods to refigure a recorded history to project an object-centric perspective on its everyday history (an episodic narrative of the bench). The object is instrumented with sensors to continuously capture the passage of time in an audio stream. This stream is parsed in order to highlight extraordinary events from the perspective of the object. These events are then arranged such that the object can have everyday expression. Happenstance and implicit points-of-view are displayed to humans and/or other objects in a timely and aesthetically engaging way; Lee calls this “audio time-lapse.” The audio time-lapse provides a temporal compression of the historical stream that adds aesthetic and cultural value in exchanging story.

With the completion of these studies, Lee is motivated that it was all for the point of leveraging this exploration in various research disciplines that underlie interactivity and expression. Objects, devices, and services can be used to manage the exchange of story with aesthetic and cultural value.