Appfrabic to Arduino

Enabling change rapidly in small, and large sprints

From creating sense driven interactions with Arduino to experience publishing models, we’re looking at what’s nearly new yet incubating–new channels that are waiting for ideas to accelerate their adoption.

Experience design has become an expansive landscape with an internet based on mobility and things taking a firm hold of our expectations and innovation. To get to new models for social interaction and behavioural change, we are playing with appfabric–our networks as software, as the new programming experience.

Case in POINT: Paul Austere

“City of Glass” has inspired numerous imprints of its story. We sliced it thinly, AGAIN, TO FIND a set of ideas that we further include newer storytelling tropes–rethinking the storytelling models.

accounting for space, place, time and a nearing unified connection to one another, we have redefined a new view for New Looking Glass City, #nlgc. What we call a citygame, telling a story, solving a mystery, in the streets of Vancouver.

We’re investing

in leading technology and mobile platforms. Principles of game and user experience design

define interaction models, while motive and emotive impact measure their meaning.

To invent new patterns for social interaction and behavioural change, we felt it was time to tell a compelling story–issue being, we wanted it to better reflect ourselves and speak to us. We revisited a previous project to find a mystery that had its feet firmly planted in being mobile, while… being an awesome story. Paul Austere’s “City of Glass” has inspired numerous echoes of his story. We trashed the thing again to find a set of ideas that we further mashed up to include more modern archetypal characters, thinking and digital storytelling models. Which was all fine and is all fine, but it requires some finely grained tools to publish and socialize our story–some exist. This became an excellent project to design how we want to tell stories with networks as our primary tools.

First, we threw Facebook out the door for its clear lack of providing us any hope of being innovative. Then we got down to researching how we actually communicate digitally, how it hits us emotionally, how the traces of our lives forming new paths to explore as near history. Now, we have more tools than we can ever hope to use. And, there’s more needed.

New Looking Glass City is a #citygame, designed to be played in the streets of Vancouver, on mobile and social networks. We’ve created a personae based framework for storytelling using autonomous avatars that both push story out and pull our players into the story world. A proof of concept, 7Somas, has been our intern . Ren will publish more on their progress as they get closer to an early beta. Designed for both iOS and Android, 7Somas explores location based narrative, pacing and crowdsourced puzzle building and solving. Upon completion of the GnR proof, we will be looking for technology and media partners to explore the next phase of #NLGC.