Narration X

Pix from my presentation at UX-LX 2010

Review of my UX-LX talk

I was quite surprised to discover one of the people who saw my presentation at UX-LX had written a review of her experience at the conference which included a synopsis of my talk.

This was a first for me. I have been mentioned in print before, but never reviewed!

A big thank you to the author Theresa Neil, who wrote positively about my talk and even included an embed with my slides.

But it does make me think how things have changed. I guess my head was down, focusing on the presentation itself and I wasn’t expecting to crop up anywhere afterwards. Now, I can see the bigger picture aspects of public speaking that stretch beyound the prep and presentation itself.

“What’s the Story?” Slides from UX-LX

There has been over a thousand views of this presentation on Slideshare, so I thought I should share it here. Its funny, recently I have been finding more applications of Storytelling when working with our clients to build great experiences. More on that soon.

Ux-Lx Talk Description and Bio

Spent ages today constructing my talk description and bio for Ux-Lisbon. I had most of the content already but I set about rewriting everything from scratch. I was long overdue a rewrite, not to mention the fact that the longer you are in this business the more compelled you are to get things perfect – which is of course an impossible task!

Here they are anyway!

What’s the Story? Infusing experiences with the craft of storytelling.

Join Séamus T. Byrne on a journey through the world of storytelling as he explores our innate human predisposition to story, the evolution of narratives with emerging technologies (from cave paintings to twitter) and the efficacy of storytelling as a tool to create better user and customer experiences.

As humans we are hardwired to a good story and digital storytelling is no exception to this! Best practices found in other disciplines for constructing a good story form can be applied to an online strategy, a multimedia piece, a user interface design or a brand campaign. Creating the right narrative is a vital step in building lasting, trusting relationships between your company’s offerings and your constituents (customers, users and advocates). Applying best practices of storytelling throughout the customer-to-user lifecycle can increase desirability, discoverability, clarity and usability.

With the advent and proliferation of interactive technologies, story has new challenges to face. Storytelling will once again evolve as it strives to maintain its immersive qualities in a world obsessed by user choice, as it adjusts to accommodate the scale of available channels, where narratives can literally be found everywhere and to embrace non-linearity, where a user walks away from an experience with a mosaic of truth

Bio
Séamus T. Byrne is founder and creative director at Graphic Mint, a design studio based in Dublin, Ireland that specialises in user centered design and customer focused marketing. He has over ten years experience as a designer of brands, interfaces, products, services and multimedia experiences for web, mobile and applications for a multitude of clients with the U.S. and Europe.

Séamus is one of the original founders and organisers of IxDA Dublin and is a member of the Irish Internet Association’s User Experience Working Group.

He was co-creator of the The Organic City, a critically acclaimed community storytelling project, encouraging locals to find and tell stories about local places through a website. These stories formed the basis for mobile media that could be re-experienced while walking around the city.

When he gets a moment to spare, Séamus likes to write songs and record music, reading about myth, traveling to new capital cities and shooting video.

He shares his thoughts everyday on twitter, and less frequently on his blogs Graphic Mind and Narration X

Flashy Friday Interface Fun

A couple of engaging interfaces I stumbled upon this week:

Don’t Click looks like its been around since 2005 but has been getting some mixed reactions on an IxDA community thread this week! Garish design but innovative concept!

Legends telegraph is Nokia’s latest product newsletter offering. The interface emulates an old fashioned newspaper that you can ramble around by dragging and dropping your mouse. The page is dotted with digital video vignettes that give the overall impression of something from a Harry Potter movie.

Check ‘em out!

A blast from digital storytellings recent Past

Hate to be revisiting old news, but whilst I was perusing some old emails I came across some interesting links:

The first is an old article about digital Storytelling on the hp iPaq. I remember the product launch being right around when we were in the middle of creating The Organic City.

The second, Ye Olde Digital Storytelling Festival from days past.

Lets Reminisce!

Alternative Locative Media

A friend came across this awesome site called The Capitol of Punk that tells the story of the history of the Washington DC punk scene. The sites URL would suggest that it is connected to Yellowarrow.net, a site I have mentioned here before, but I am not entirely sure what the connection is. Anyway, the content is extremely professionally executed (nice grungy design too, or, I should probably say, punky!) but of particular interest to me is their use of storymapping.

They have created a combo of google maps, location based video podcast walking tours and a downloadable pdf map (which is exactly what we created with the organic city!-except for the Google map bit, as it wasn’t around when we were developing the site). The walking tours are also accessible via text message on a mobile phone.

Epic 2015

I remember a professor showing our class this short multimedia movie EPIC 2015 some years back. A year or so later I remember seeing it again and thinking how prophetic this piece really is and how close the ending is to some of the concepts we explored with the Organic City project.

The Organic City Interview Podcast

Sarah (my fellow OC creator) and I were recently interviewed by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, Ca. The interviewer was Joe Lambert, a pioneer and author in digital storytelling. The final interview is available as a podcast at StoryMapping Stories.

Possible titles for a new book!

Here goes…
“This video storytelling buzz is taking me over” or how about
” 1,000 new business models to make money with web video”
or “locative media for dummies”, but seriously, there are some real fun uses of video content on the web.

Here are three of my current favorites.

The infamous You Tube

The impressive Turn Here

The hilarious Doggymentary