Once Upon a Future

Once Upon a Future:
An Audio Drama Game for Episodic Imagination

Overview:
Envisioning the future in a multidisciplinary collaboration continues to be a challenge. This paper presents a tool for engineers and designers to envision applications of emerging technologies. Drawing on the "suspension of disbelief" in audio drama and episodic memory theory about creativity, we build a four-act board game for creative narration. Participants are guided to enact future application scenarios by using playing cards along with theme music and sound effects. To test the tool, we conducted three workshops to discuss the distinct advantages and challenges of this approach.

Methods:

Research through Design
Semi-Structured Interview
Design Workshop
Thematic Analysis

Results & Contribution:

An Audio Drama Board Game: Once Upon a Future
Introduce Design Strategy of Episodic and Associative Imagination into Creative Design Tasks
Mediate and Facilitate Discussion between Diverse Background of Experts in a Research Center

Collaborators & Acknowledgement:

Rung-Huei Liang (supervisor), Wenn-Chieh Tsai (researcher), David Chung (researcher), Willson (engineering), Guo-Lin Tsai (designer), Hen-An Lin (designer), Ya-Han Lee (designer), Wen-Wei Chang (designer).

Publications:

Yu-Ting Cheng, Wenn-Chieh Tsai, David Chung, and Rung-Huei Liang. 2018. Once Upon a Future: An Audio Drama Game for Episodic Imagination. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '18 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 159–163. https://doi.org/10.1145/3197391.3205429

Brief

The following presents a brief introduction and research photos of the project. More details can be seen in my publication or contact me for further information.

MOTIVATION

Envisioning futures can be a challenge for researchers, taking time and effort to collect data and collaborate with a multidisciplinary team. In the NTU IoX research centre we cooperated with, we found that most of the existing practice is a one-way process relying heavily on individual interpretations (see Problem). Therefore, we demonstrate a possible solution that facilitates co-imagination among researchers from different disciplinary to address this issue (see Our Goal).

DESIGN EXPLORATION

Our design exploration found that audio drama can encourage people to imagine characters, things, and stories without relying on visual components. Audio drama has the power to suspend disbelief, which is a key advantage of design fiction. By immersing people in the story world and encouraging them to create episodic details, audio drama can help boost creativity and imagination.

We believe that imagined scenes are crucial for making sense of possible usage scenarios of innovative technologies. To engage people in co-creating the futures, we developed a card-based audio drama game called "Once Upon a Future".

We explored different narrative structures that can support a dialogical future scenario discussion between designers, researchers, and engineers.

temporal structure

The temporal structure of a narrative provides a scaffold that guides the story from its beginning to its end. One well-known narrative structure is the hero's journey (Campbell, 2014), which consists of four major plots: departure, initiation, challenge, and return. We utilised the hero's journey's four-plots structure to design the major narrative structure for this project.

spatial structure

The spatial structure we used in this project is inspired by the popular board game, Betrayal at House on the Hill. This game provides players with various locations to explore, unlocking different rooms and progressing through the story. The visualization of these places engages players in the story's spatial structure. We adapted this spatial structure to design the storytelling materials for our project.

DESIGN DETAILS

Opening cards consist of four acts. The first is a close-up of a factory corner, the second is a wider shot, the third shows an emergency, and the fourth concludes with news or a summary. This technique quickly sets up the story's setting, context, and stakes to hook the viewer and create anticipation.

Opening Cards

Location cards illustrate possible scenarios in the factory, 8 in total. Each location card is embedded with one ambient sound.

Location Cards

Tech cards describe technology innovations, which provide players to discuss how the technologies can be used in future factories. Tech cards include two different types of technology. One is developed by the Research Center; another is from Sci-fi movies from an open-source database, Technovlgy.

Tech Cards

Event cards illustrates possible activities in the factory.

Event Cards

Adopted from the card game of `Once upon a time', the ending cards present a possible story ends for the factory.

Ending Cards

Players can summarise their co-constructive narratives with this audio recap.

Audio Recap

Murmurs slip are short colloquial sentences formulated from different characters perspective in a game. They can serve as prompts in storytelling to elicit rich conversations and varied role- playing.

Murmur Slip

4 plot boards present the storytelling process, and the hint of placing which boards on it. 4 plots can connect to each other to make a big game board.

Plot Boards

A speaker is embedded with RFID scanner that can scan cards to play sound.

RFID Speaker

WORKSHOP

We held 3 interdisciplinary workshops for NTU IoX research center. Each workshop was led by an HCI background facilitator who is familiar with the game topic and rules. After four rounds, a team constructed the narratives and got four audio recaps. Finally, participants were encouraged to discuss and reflect critically by voting for the most inspiring moments.

OUTCOMES

Future Factory Comic Book

We collected stories from the board games to illustrate six future scenarios about future factory.

We asked an illustrator, GGDOG, to make these drawings.

Future Factory Comic Book

We printed these comic books back to the research centre and invited them to have an open discussion about the future factory applications.

Reflections on Distributed Monitoring: Quantified Well-Being

With artificial eyes, all cops are distributed monitoring. One day, by indoor positioning, Raze found something weird in the restroom, two workers are getting together for a long time. He jacked into one of them to see what happened there. “You know, his fragrance and voice always make me short- circuited”, the other one said. During the connection, their gossip and emotional recognition made him blush with shame. The artificial eye of the hacked one was aware of this malicious eavesdropper, and forced the cop to logout. Everything returned to its original state.

Cyborg: Quantified Well-Being

Similar to a machine, Cyborg is able to spread the pleasing fragrance that humans like easily. Cyborg also owns complex emotions so that she is more sensitive to human situations than a machine is. In this era of smart factory, people augment themselves by printing out and installing various robotic parts on their bodies. Human and machine build a close partnership, and even an intimate relationship.

Factory in the Sky: Smart Manufacturing 5.0

To reduce the burden of the freight, drones sling factories and allow cyborgs and those people with power suits to work in the sky. Like a satellite, keeping its orbit by the force of gravity, working in the sky becomes a lightweight production.

Virtual Sport Competition: Smart Manufacturing 5.0

German team announce “LazyTech”, a telepresence device controlled by brain wave. It’s possible to work while sleeping! People would like to use it to participate an emergency meeting, even participate a virtual sport competition at the same time. This LazyTech makes people have a habitual distraction. We are curious about what if people can join others’ dreams?

New Human Computer Interface: Quantified Well-Being

A 3D printer raised her J-head and tried to print out invisible problems or situations, one by one. Those printed things are not only the problems but also the associated solutions, steps, and tools. A tacit agreement happened between human and machine. In one technology report, one machine stated, “Why should I waste my time with human? The communication with image is the best way to avoid misunderstandings”.

Robot Evolution: Smart Manufacturing 5.0

An anonymous cyborg is hacking the factory by extending haptic feedback of the factory robotic arms. Meanwhile, the central supercomputer augmented each robotic arm with built-in camera and auditory feedback as a precaution against espionage. To continually interact with this mysterious hacker, the supercomputer shut down his automatic system upgrade, as a message of inviting more hacks.