Blended Experience Narratives

Our work employs conceptual integration, otherwise known as blending, as a tool for designing interactions that work across and between the digital/physical divide. Theoretical approaches to blends can be difficult to navigate and a hard subject to get to grips with, particularly for novice designers. This paper offers a synthesis of the literature around this topic developed into a framework. We use speculative design as a means for iterating solutions that employ physical/digital transitions. Working collaboratively with thirteen undergraduate university students attending a twelve-day Blended Interactions workshop, we developed speculative narrative storyboards over the course of a live theatre festival ultimately presenting proposed solutions as part of the festival itself. Narratives drew on data gathered through participant observation and interviews of stakeholders with data and feedback from over 380 festival visitors. Presenting the storyboards to festival participants provided direct feedback. The student storyboards were professionally illustrated affording us a means for evaluating our framework in further work.