A Future Hybrid Storytelling Festival
The Scottish International Storytelling Festival is an international storytelling event established in 1989, running in Edinburgh every October. With the aim to profile and encourage the almost forgotten art of live oral storytelling, the festival invites storytellers to share stories and legends of their own lands, and attracts story lovers from across the world. However, due to restrictions on physical gatherings and travelling during the pandemic, a digital form of storytelling festival has been developed and tested out.
We saw the step into the digital platform as a new opportunity, as is offered to the festival to develop new ways to work with audiences, therefore benefiting from a broader audience group especially the international ones. Based on these challenges, this project focused on exploring new ways in the post-pandemic era to deliver the liveness of the storytelling experience for international audiences to better engage with the festival.
Frame
Edinburgh College of Art
October 2023
The Team
Jenny Hu
Yihan Sun
Zehuan Wang
Brief
The brief asked our team to explore historical and contemporary developments across digital media. Under the given topic "Smart Cities", we were asked to choose a specific context to explore novel ways of interacting and engaging with sensing technologies in the suited places.
Design Process
Identify
Currently, the Scottish International Storytelling Festival included 5 types of events. The team and I decided to focus specifically on the pre-recorded session because this type of event is considered a gate facing the largest number of international audiences.
For audiences, the existing challenges of the pre-recorded session are:
1. a lack of 'live buzz' compares to the live avenue.
2. audiences feel less connection between themselves and the story which was an essential experience in traditional live storytelling.
“The mutually heightened attention and awareness of the live performance can be intensive when people share the same space with each other.”-- Thomas Smith
Ideation
Based on research and exploration, our final idea is to set up pop-up storytelling events located in countries and specific areas of SISF cooperation with ( India, Sierra Leone, Canada, and the USA). By inviting local citizens to watch the storytelling videos together, we want to create a cinema-like environment to incentive emotional engagements in the crowd, feel the live buzz as the traditional storytelling.
User Journey:
AR supplements the ‘on-stage’ storyline
1.
Started by placing a personal item on the display table. The camera is going to scan it and choose a story related to your item from the data base.
The AR screen will display a story-related effect on the item.
2.
Listen to the story chosen for you.
AR is going to make your item appears like the object during the storytelling.
3.
After the storytelling session, share your own stories about your item with us.
The story will be uploaded and shared on the “interactive screens” at all spots in world wide.