THE CHANGING NATURE OF CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND THE TRANSMEDIA EXPERIENCE (Key Concept)

 What do we mean by creative technologies?

The term creative technologies generally refers to the use of technology in the production of
creative work. And it has a particular focus on adapting and working with cutting edge
technologies, combining creative work with technical development.

Certain areas such as music studios, are clearly delineated as creative, others such as the web
are less so, but in reality, any technology can be used creatively. We now live in a world where
design and media agencies develop and mix together their own technologies with creative goals
in mind.

For example, by making smartphone apps or building customer interactive concepts for events
of particular significance is interactivity. Programmers and engineers are increasingly involved
in the creative process surrounding interactive experiences, meaning that there is a less clear
distinction between the creative users, and the makers of technology.

Technologies have converged, so they are all mediated by digital devices, predominately
computers and mobile devices. This convergence has impacted many media companies, such as
newspapers and TV stations. Similarly, a web page is often a collage of text and other digital
media.

The divergence is an explosion of different formats and context, as well as personalized content
and content that is always changing with a smart phone in their pocket, literally anyone can be
a media producer.

 Creative technology and experience

A key challenge in creative technologies is managing the relationship between creative

intentions and their realization. This requires a solid understanding of what is possible and also
good strategies for communicating and managing expectations. Born out of this change is the
experience designer, who brings a skill set and focus that compliment other roles such as a
producer or a writer. The experience designer thinks about how different technologies, different
media, and different context go into the effect of telling the story, or more generally, the
creation of an experience

Experience Designer:

 Manage the balance between achieving the ultimate creative vision and the capabilities
and limitations of the technology used.
 Think about how different technologies, media and contexts can affect the telling of a
story or the creation of an experience

 What effect is technology having on creative work?

The entire relationship between creators and their audience is changing. Let's consider a view
from a recent report on the changing face of the creative industries conducted by technology
firm Ericson:

“Cheap, ubiquitous ICT is eroding the benefits of scale for traditional media companies, as cost
savings generated from centralized production and distribution decline. Media firms operating
in this rapidly changing environment have to adapt quickly to create or to sustain their
competitive advantage.!

-Ericson, ICT and Future of Media 2007

So audiences have been replaced by prosumers, who are not just consumers of content, but
they're instead actively involved in shaping the stages of creation, production, and distribution.
Another change in creative work is through new modes of production or new forms of
experience. Consider the rapidly changing world of video games, incorporating radical new
forms of digital experience such as new sensor technologies, and head mounted displays. (3D
Video, VR)

Where interaction is involved, the creative production context shifts radically as the user
becomes more in control of the experiences.

Interactive systems may result in a nonlinear unfolding of events which means that you don't go
through the experience from start to finish. It requires an expectation of the user's behavior.

What are some important considerations when thinking about adopting more interactive
technologies such as games or virtual reality into your storytelling strategy?

 You cannot rely on an audience member in an interactive context experiencing all

aspects of a story in linear fashion, so ensuring they experience enough of the story to
make sense becomes more challenging
 The audience becomes more in control of how their engagement and therefore may
individually experience different versions of the central storyline
 The design can become more complex when using interactive technologies because
audience actions are less predictable

Audio and video files are static in contrast to interactive media. Static means the content never
changes and has a fixed order, but of course you can interact with them. Indeed, you can even
interact with a book, using its table of contents and index to access the content in a nonlinear
way. Beware that this terminology isn't precise and used by different people in different ways.

So, to recap, transmedia storytelling is often closely related to the use of emerging
technologies, it entails new ways of working. Because of the rapid pace of change and the need
to innovate with new technology, in order to work with media that are increasingly interactive
and nonlinear, and in order to deal with the integration of different media into a coherent
experience.

We also need to think holistically about the context in which technology is used. Thus, an
important role exists for the experience designer as well as engineers and programmers working
in creative teams.
Brian Seth Hurst – Choosing a technology platform:

“For me, I start to think, okay, where can this story live? Where am I going to make my first
approach to the audience? Is it going to be television, is it going to be film, is it going to be a
video game? Where is the first place this storyworld is going to appear. Is it going to be a story
told over Twitter, before I move to another platform? But if you watch what the fans do, and
did, it led the way…”

“What I can do is start in one place. What's the place you're going to start in? Think through your
story Bible, think through your characters, think through your story arc. What is the history over
time? All of that should be worked out before you even decide where it's going to live”

“So then they do a little research. You got to know what's going on in each one of these
platforms, you got to know how the audience is behaving with content and with each other, is
very challenging to teach audiences new behavior. So, you want to capitalize on the behavior
that already exists. So, I tell people when I'm guest lecturing at classes and stuff. I say, look at
something that already exists in your genre, or the story that you're trying to tell. And see what's
happening, see what successes there's been. See what failures there've been.”

Henry Jenkins - Examples of technological affordances and audience experience

You should start by figuring what's going to best serve the story, the character, and the world,
and what are the affordances I need to give the viewer the experiences I want to give them
around that story?
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGIES TO TELL YOUR STORY (Key concept)

What conceptual language is useful for describing different media and how we can work with
them in transmedia storytelling?

As we have seen, interactive technologies can sometimes require the involvement of designers
in the team to think about how different people handle different media or experiences. The field
of interaction design is an important source of concepts and methods that help us work with
creative technologies.

 Affordances (Asequibilidad)

Interaction designers often talk about affordances of a device, object or medium. An affordance
basically describes something you can do to an object. A button can be pushed, a door handle
can be grabbed, pulled, pushed and perhaps turned. We can say that the door handle affords
turning and the button affords pushing. It's an available possibility in the realm of possible
interactions with that object. And in these cases, affordances are clear to the user.

The inventor of the term affordance, James Gibson, was not a designer, but an ecologist
interested in describing how animals interact with their environment. He wanted to be able to
talk about the properties of that environment, in a way that would help you to understand the
properties of the animal that had evolved to act in the environment. For example, Gibson says
“air affords breathing… It also affords unimpeded locomotion relative to the ground... It also
affords the perception of vibratory events by means of sound fields...” So here, Gibson is saying
that literally the air around us participates in a whole set of different interactions even ones that
we're not aware of.

This is useful for understanding which media experiences. Our built-in environment is full of
interactive potentials that we may not be fully aware of. Affordance is always described relative
to an actor. The air affords flying for birds but not for fish. One of the most influential texts in
the world of design is The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. One of Norman's
innovations was to borrow the term affordances from Gibson and apply it to design, to describe
how we make objects more useable.

One of his key principles is that the designer should enable the user to have a good conceptual
model of their interaction with the designed object. And it's in supporting this conceptual model,
that Norman talks about affordances. A distinction between Norman's approach to affordances
in design, and Gibson's original use of the term, is that Norman is more interested in perceived
affordances.

Those affordances that are immediately evident to a person as a way of designing good
interactions. Norman sees perceived affordances as the preferred way to tell you what you need
to know. He says “complex things may require explanation, but simple things should not. When
simple things need pictures, labels, or instructions, the design has failed” – D. Norman, 2002

Affordances: The characteristics of a designed object or product should suggest to someone how
it is intended to be used

 Constrains

Norman also talks about constraints, constraints limit how something can be used, constraints
that are more confusing error designers, they can take very different forms. Norman identifies
physical, logical, and cultural constraints. The most obvious area is physical constraints, or
negative affordances. They are the things you physically cannot do with an object, for example
in automatic cars by design, you need to hold down the foot brake before you can put the car
into drive. Logical and cultural constraints by analogy narrow your range of actions, or encourage
specific actions, by some logical or cultural factors. They're not as rigid as physical constraints.

Bill Gaver, a design expert whose focus is on digital interaction clarifies that good design involves
making sure that there is a strong correlation between what we can sense and what we can do.

Making sure hidden affordances are made visible and that there are no affordances that are
implied but aren't actually possible.

In media, we are equally as interested in actual and perceived affordances. In fact, our interest
varies from the design of specific objects or interfaces. To the entire ecosystems of creation and
interaction involved in creative industries. This is not entirely dissimilar to the complex biological
ecosystems Gibson was interested in. In this context, there are many affordances that we may
need to know about that are not visible to the user, but are nevertheless important for our
design.

These design considerations come together most evidently in the creation of platforms.
Platforms are entire environments in which a piece of media content or software might be
experienced. This includes operating systems, like Windows for PC's, or Android for smart
phones, a gaming platform such as Xbox. Web services such as YouTube and indeed the web
itself. Platforms establish a host of affordances and constraints with which media producers
must work.

Operating systems are fully programmable and have fewer constraints, whereas media
platforms such as YouTube are often more carefully constrained. Increasingly, imposed
constraints deal with safety and security.

Constraints: The physical, logical or cultural limits related to an object or design that prevent it
being used for a specific purpose

To recap, when thinking about interactive media in particular, but more generally, any form of
media or creative technology, design concepts such as affordances and constraints are useful.
Affordances describe the set of actions that makes it impossible. Affordances are always
described relative to an actor. Perceived affordances are those actions that we can immediately
sense are possible. Constraints are things that are not possible that may be inherent or imposed
by a designer. We can analyze media, objects, programs, devices and platforms in terms of
affordances and constraints.