The Geolocalized Storytelling and Futuring project is an exploratory and experimental project carried out as a stepping stone towards possible further grant applications and research initiatives. It examines ways of gathering research data on future scenarios through the use of a “geolocalized app” (e.g. a mobile application that reacts to the user’s location) that tells an interactive narrative. The hypothesis is that by collecting research data from participants that are physically situated in the location they imagine in a possible future is qualitatively different from doing so in a workshop setting. In other words, we hypothesize that developing a future scenario while being immersed in a specific context may yield better results than doing so in abstract.
As a preliminary exploration of this problem space, Gabriele Ferri was “project owner” in the Minor in “Mobile Development” (faculty ICT, teacher: Marco Marcellis). A team of students, hosted by Info.nl (referent: Iskander Smit) was tasked with creating a smartphone app that would tell an interactive story while reacting to GPS coordinates.
Later, Gabriele Ferri tutored Genevieve Korte (research intern at Civic Interaction Design) in creating an interactive story using the app, and in playtesting and documenting the outputs.
The app has been demoed so far at the Games for Cities training school, and further grant applications will use it as a “proof of concept” towards further research.