Proudly presenting our students’ interactive digital narratives

By Renske van Enschot

In our Master course Interactive Storytelling, students create their own non-fiction interactive digital narratives. In these interactive narratives, readers become interactors who can engage with the characters, choose which storyline to follow, which perspectives to explore, et cetera. The design of the interactive narratives is justified by theories about the experience and effects of (interactive) narratives.

In the ’21-’22 edition of the course, the theme for all interactive digital narratives was diversity and inclusion. The students rose to the occasion and designed powerful interactive narratives on a diverse range of subtopics, from social anxiety to street intimidation to poverty. We proudly showcase some of the narratives below.

Are you sure and Eyes on me let you experience what it is like to suffer from social anxiety. How do you navigate school, friends, and party invites while dealing with anxiety?

Fading is about what it’s like to build and sustain a good relationship with a mother with evolving Alzheimer’s. Are you able to reconnect with your mother after she fails to recognize your face?

Blind spots allows the interactants to walk in the main character’s shoes to come to better understanding of how visual impairment affects people and their daily media usage. It is aimed to activate designers to create more inclusive designs for different websites and online platforms.

Between two worlds. The life of a CODA makes you realize what it is like to be a child of deaf parents.

Roll with me enables interactants to learn how to support a friend or family member in a wheelchair.

Summer camp and Two sides of the same coin focus on how poverty affects the daily lives of school children. You get to try out how to include poor children in everyday scenarios. A new face in class also aims at school children, discussing what it’s like to have a refugee in class.

It does(n’t) matter helps interactants realize what it’s like to be the victim of street intimidation and what the (limited) impact is of the choices that you make.

Open Your Eyes revolves around the increasingly common problem of discrimination at work. What it is like to work a shift as an Asian nurse in a Dutch hospital? During your day you will have some tough decisions to make, which will have a lasting effect on your stress level.

Diversity University enables you to spend a day in the shoes of an international student to see what issues they face and, more importantly, learn what you can do to make sure all nationalities feel welcome on campus.

Sparkside is all about pronouns. They can’t be seen from someone’s appearance or name, but they are crucial in expressing one’s identity. In this interactive narrative, you step into the footsteps of a teacher who tries to learn how to use pronouns correctly.

Showcasing our students’ interactive narratives

By Renske van Enschot

In our master course Interactive Storytelling, students create their own non-fiction interactive digital narratives. In these interactive narratives, readers become interactors who can engage with the characters, choose which storyline to follow, which perspectives to explore, et cetera. The design of the interactive narratives is justified by theories about the experience and effects of (interactive) narratives. In the ’20-’21 edition of the course, the theme for all interactive digital narratives was diversity and inclusion (see our previous blogpost on this theme). The students came up with impressive interactive narratives on a diverse range of subtopics, from inequality on the work floor to the prejudices towards the LGBTQ community. We proudly showcase some of the narratives below.

Aged lets you explore the challenges that elderly people face at work or in everyday situations.

On the same subtopic, Meet May lets you step into the shoes of May, a 71 y/o grandmother who is confronted and struggles with innovative technology.

Is this your friend? is about an elementary school friendship between cultures. Interactors learn how different cultures experience and cope with diversification, and get to decide how the story ends.

Town is about implicit biases concerning gender, sexuality, disabilities, ethnicity, and visual appearance. The interactor is invited to explore different stories and reflect on his/her own biases.

In Listen up, you get to experience what it is like to have a hearing impairment on the work floor. Learn what it takes to feel included at work as a young hearing-impaired person.

Hop on a job lets children aged 11-14 yo experience different occupations. This interactive narrative hopes to reduce prejudices towards low status occupations and create awareness of the required skills and necessity of these jobs.

In We regret to inform you, you become a recruiter and discover which choices recruiters have to make, which prejudices they may have and how this affects the applicants who want to secure their place in the labour market.

And do have a look at these interactive narratives as well:

Adoption: Dutch on the inside – Asian from the outside
Autism: But you don’t look autistic at all
Down syndrome: My special friend Hannah
Dutch children’s holiday Saint Nicholas: Who’s walking on my roof?
Gender discrimination in the workplace: Hard work pays off
Hearing impairment: Unheard
LGBTQ: Being allowed to love whoever you want
LGBTQ: Class Dandelion
LGBTQ: Sexual Diversity
Rwandan genocide survivors: Bèkske – Rwanda Empowerment Coffee

When do we believe misinformation?

One of our master students, Jazzy Beek, is currently working on her master thesis project. In this blog post, Jazzy and her supervisor Hendrik Engelbrecht describe how the NMD courses Interactive Storytelling and Data and (Mis)Information have helped shape this master thesis by combining different fields.

Online, an abundance of knowledge is only a mouse click away. While humans have never experienced access to such a diversity of high quality information, filtering fact from fiction has become increasingly difficult as well. Misinformation is widespread and pervasive, which poses serious challenges to societies that base policy on evidence-based approaches. An often used form of misinformation is that of narratives.

Narratives are omnipresent: be it novels, movies, commercials or even social media posts. So much of our daily lives consist of writing, telling, listening, or reading stories. In the Interactive Storytelling course, students learn what makes narratives so powerful at persuasion. For instance, narratives are often much stronger than evidence-based arguments, because they are engaging and easier to process and comprehend.

Did you ever read a book or watch a movie in which one of the main characters tragically experiences terminal illness and you felt really sad? This is also called “identification”, which means perceiving the story events from the character’s perspective. When you identify with a character in a narrative, you are less likely to generate counterarguments against the message in the narrative. Readers or viewers are therefore more tolerant towards lower accuracy of the presented information because stories appeal to emotion rather than reason.

Because of this, misinformation is commonly spread in the form of a narrative. There are many examples of misleading narratives online, such as the myth that vaccinations cause autism. What makes these narratives often so powerful is that they appeal to a very basic human emotion – fear. Misinformation typically makes use of so-called fear appeals in order to persuade the reader. For example, the narrative about how vaccinations cause autism has led to considerable fear for many parents, which eventually resulted in the rise of vaccine-preventable diseases. In the Data and (Mis)Information course, students learn to develop a critical attitude towards data and information and explore questions such as “Why do people believe in the link between vaccinations and autism?”. Understanding the process of how (mis)information works presents the first step towards fighting it.

Jazzy’s thesis combines these approaches by investigating whether misinformation in narrative fear appeals is more accepted among readers who identify with a character. In her study she uses a narrative fear appeal, in the form of a social media post, to see how a seemingly harmless behavior can be turned on it’s head to create a threat.

The need to understand how misinformation affects people’s perceptions has become especially urgent now. Understanding how this affects people’s perceptions will hopefully lead to better ways to tackle misinformation.

Curious about Jazzy’s blog post for the course Data and (Mis)Information about fighting misinformation with storytelling? Click here!

Huggie – a remote haptic sensory prototype

In our research skills course Rapid Prototyping, taught by Simone Ashby, students learn how to create prototypes to answer research questions. In this blog post, Eveline de Groot, Laura Beamuz, Markus Pandrea, and Nour Tanak, who took this course in the fall of 2020, talk about their group assignment, and the prototype they’ve created.

huggie – embracing the distance

For the Rapid Prototyping course, the assignment was to formulate a research question that addresses a specific problem space, and to develop a prototype that impacts the world. Looking at present-day world problems, we unanimously agreed on COVID-19 and elderly as a focus. Our assumption was that the elderly feel lonely and isolated, which has become more evident as the COVID-19 pandemic shifted to the forefront of their daily lives. We experienced this first hand with our own grandparents, since they were forced to socially distance themselves from their loved ones. This social distancing led to the absence of physical affection, which is greatly missed. Our focus point became haptic sensory technologies and how these could be of help during social distancing. In the end, we came up with the following research question: How can remote haptic sensory technologies decrease feeling of loneliness among the elderly?

We saw this assignment and this research question as an opportunity to get out of our comfort zones, as we set out to create a prototype of a product with not just digital components, but also physical parts. Throughout the course, we first engaged in individual parallel prototyping (see sketches below), after which we combined our best findings and ideas into a collectively iterative prototype .

Sketches of individual prototypes

Through several iterations (low, medium, and high fidelity) and feedback moments with Simone, we converged to a prototype that we came to call huggie. Huggie is a smart pillow (see pictures below) that connects people remotely through a sensory and tactile experience.

Medium fidelity prototype. This prototype was merged from the individual low fidelity prototypes during the parallel session, into one iterative prototype.

Besides a pillow, huggie also features a shirt (see high-fidelity prototype below). Both the pillow and the shirt are made of smart fabrics. The smart fabric of the pillow simulates the heartbeat and temperature of your loved ones and takes in the pressure of their hug. This data is sent wirelessly to the compatible, connected shirt. When one person hugs the pillow, the other person wearing a compatible shirt feels the pressure of the hug, heartbeat, and temperature of the other, bringing them closer to each other despite the distance. The lit-up huggie logo indicates that you and your loved one are connected over distance.

High fidelity prototype. The complete huggie concept with the logo, pillow, shirt, and box design.

We, Eveline de Groot, Laura Beamuz, Markus Pandrea, and Nour Tanak, as a group, had a lot of fun exploring the different ways to prototype and develop something we had come to love so passionately. Huggie is a product of love, born from the love we have for our grandparents struggling with the isolation.

With huggie we are embracing the distance.

huggie launch video

Teaching about Diversity & Inclusion

By the New Media Design teacher team

Diversity and inclusion are – rightfully so – often debated topics. Think about the #BlackLivesMatter protests, the efforts to increase the number of women in top positions, technology to enhance social participation for people living with disabilities, et cetera. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, diversity is “the condition or quality of being diverse, different, or varied”. This can be about gender, ethnicity, cultural background, religion, age, physical or mental disabilities, et cetera. We live in a diverse world, and an important first step is to acknowledge this. Inclusion goes a step further. Inclusion is about not only acknowledging this diversity but about acting upon it. It is about letting all people participate in society, without thresholds. In an ideal, inclusive world, everything is accessible for anyone. We are respectful to other views, welcoming, willing to listen, willing to learn from each other and take decisions together.

In New Media Design, the importance of a diverse and inclusive society also translates to designing for inclusion and diversity. Several examples of technology design have shown what can go wrong when design teams are not diverse, think about the Gorillas incident in Google Photos’ image recognition algorithm. As designers and design researchers, we believe that we have a responsibility to prevent such issues, and to contribute to diversity and inclusion in society.

This academic year, the theme ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ will receive extra attention in our New Media Design track. The theme will be incorporated in several of our courses.

In the master’s course Creativity and Innovation, we discuss how making an effort to understand each other’s differences can unlock the potential of diversity in creative collaborations.
In the master’s course User Experience Design, for instance, we will dive into the ethics of technology design, and the responsibility we, as designers, have to prevent adverse unintended consequences of our designs, such as exclusion and discrimination. We will practice with anticipating such unintended consequences by means of futuring exercises and creating design fictions.
In the master’s course Interactive Storytelling, students will design and publish an interactive digital narrative on the topic of diversity & inclusion. Narratives – and interactive narratives even more so – are a powerful instrument to get to know other perspectives. They enable you to take on the position of someone completely different from yourself, to see the world through their eyes and act as if you are this other person. This helps in moving away from stereotypes to a deep understanding and awareness for different points of views, challenging and enriching your worldview.
A last example is our bachelor course Play and Game, in which gaming culture and inclusive game design are important topics of discussion. The gaming scene has long suffered, and is still suffering from various types of toxic behavior and a lack of inclusion. To a large extent, this stems from the fact that this field, including the players as well as anyone involved in the development and publishing of games, is traditionally dominated by young, white men, which has resulted in all kinds of conscious and unconscious biases, with far-reaching consequences. Ironically, although games can be especially beneficial for people with disabilities, a lot of games are currently not playable for them because there are no accessibility options. Fortunately, thanks to several advocates who are not afraid to speak up and take action, the field is slowly but surely becoming more inclusive and accessible. In this course, we try to increase our awareness of these aspects of game design that are unfortunately still commonly overlooked.

We will report back to you via this blog with the results of these endeavors later this academic year!

Congratulations to our NMD graduates!

Last week, 23 NMD students received their master’s degrees! We are very proud of the diverse and relevant research that these students have carried out for their masters’ theses.

Just to name a few research topics that were presented during the graduation ceremonies: the effects of robot gestures on children’s learning engagement, the role of intuition in the creative design process, 3D printing for occupational therapists, establishing understanding of complex issues by means of interactive narratives, and the effect of feedback on intrinsic motivation in virtual reality games.

Congratulations to all NMD masters! We are looking forward to following your careers in the NMD field!

Interactive story “A Father’s Rights”

In the Master course Interactive Storytelling, taught by Renske van Enschot, our students learn all about what interactive stories entail, how these stories are experienced, and how they can be used strategically, for instance for learning and behavior change. As a group assignment, the students create their own interactive journalistic story. The story below is a wonderful example of the stories created by the students in the fall semester of 2018. Arold, Carmen, Laura and Wesley designed and developed the story called “A Father’s Rights”, which raises awareness of the sensitive and difficult topic of unwanted pregnancy and abortion by inviting the reader to explore the perspectives of all parties involved.

Please click the image to experience A Father’s Rights yourself!