Prototyping with our Audience

Interactive stories and experiences are only good and relevant in the way they are manipulated by the end user. They are conceived for someone to crawl inside, circulate, manipulate, hesitate, move things around, alter, react, lie down, maybe daydream…

Prototyping the technology is not enough: we need to prototype the user experience with the user himself in order to get it right. Industrial design and architects have been good at this for decades. But what does this mean for documentary? If its process is a creative interpretation of the world, what happens to this very interpretation when the audience is part of the process?

Hugues Sweeney, Head of French Language Interactive Media Production at NFB Canada, uses his projects Megaphone, A Journal of Insomnia and Primal to think about the idea of prototyping when the audiences is part of the design process through conception, development and production phases in the video below.

Prototyping with our Audience w/ Hugues Sweeney – The Conference from Power to the Pixel on Vimeo.