Introduction to Narrative Experience Design (Johanna Koljonen at Alibis for Interaction 2015)

What is an experience? What is design? What is a human being? To make sure we’re all on the same page, we’ll start with the basics!

You’re already an experience designer. You are working in some way with getting humans to go somewhere to do something. You’d maybe even like to turn your audience, or consumers, or citizens, into active participants in your art, or retail experience, or democracy. But how do we do that? By providing them with an Alibi for Interaction.

An alibi is an object, rule or social dynamic that changes the meaning or consequences of an action. By providing an alibi, you remove social cost, such as the fear of embarrassment or the worry of appearing rude. This lowers the threshold of participation, increasing agency and therefore enabling your participants to try new behaviours within the magic circle (the boundary of the designed experience).

Johanna reminds us we are all already expert designers, teaches us terminology that enables us to reflect on and share what we already know, and shows us that absolutely every aspect of an experience is, in fact, a designable surface.

ABOUT JOHANNA

Johanna Koljonen (b 1978) is a broadcaster, author, critic, media analyst and experience designer. She is an internationally renowned expert in Nordic larp, where her main design interests have been indexical representation and systems to enable safe participation. She teaches transmedia design for professionals and at university.

She hosts the Crosstalks.tv science talk show as well as the TV-cirkeln aftershow, which she also co-created, for Swedish national television. She is a popular lecturer at and moderator of conferences and corporate events.

Johanna is a co-founder of Alibis for Interaction, as well as of the Stockholm-based Rundfunk Media AB production company, which makes public service radio, television and transmedia, and of the independent consultancy Johanna Koljonen AB.

Together with Andreas Ekström, Johanna is the author of Främling, a cultural analysis of Swedish pop phenomenon Carola. She writes the Oblivion High graphic novels for comic book artist Nina von Rüdiger and fiction for print, TV and the stage.

ABOUT ALIBIS

Alibis for Interaction is an annual masterclass for designers of experiences, services, events, games, democratic processes, facilitation and participatory culture – all fields where audiences or consumers are turning into participants and co-creators.