The Case of Tara Patel
PLATFORMS AND WORLDBUILDING | This project was a part of my MFA in Design and Technology at the Parsons School of Design. An interactive prototype that invites the user to create their own journey through a fictional narrative, this project highlights how media shapes our perspectives .
The Goal
To create an interactive story that builds a world and a narrative through a series of platforms, where readers can inform their own journey in the prototype to infer their own narratives and conclusions.
The Timeline
March-April 2023.
The Process
Writing, narrative structure, characterisation, structuring, architecture, navigation, wireframing and prototyping, testing.
People today spend a great deal of time living their lives online. We find ways to document every detail of our lives on the internet. With the advent of social media in particular, we can now express ourselves, communicate, work, travel, and entertain ourselves online. Considering the parts of ourselves we’re putting on the internet, what does our online persona say about us? What image are we cultivating and expressing to the world?
This project explores these questions through the story of a fictional friend of the reader named Tara Patel. The premise of the story follows the event of Tara’s death. The reader finds Tara’s mother’s obituary post on Facebook and then has to comb through different social media platforms their community engages in to find out how Tara died.
This prototype can be tested below.
Building a Narrative
I wanted the story to be an interactive journey, with no fixed or certain ending. Different people would arrive at different conclusions to the mystery depending on the path they took navigating through the prototype.
I started with building an outline of Tara’s life, important touchstones, and people involved.
Once I had my plot points in place, I started organising the story into different platforms so I could categorise interactions and user flow.
Prototyping & Testing
For the first round of prototyping, I put together a series of mockups on Figma utilising each social media platform I wanted to use. I focused on the structure of the narrative, and on deciding and realising how much information the reader needed to have at every stage. This prototype was built on the premise of the reader getting a hold of the friend, Tara Patel’s, phone.
I tested this prototype with classmates and peers. The feedback they game me helped me better flesh out the narrative, the interactions, the flow, and the details. The core opportunities for improvement that were reiterated by multiple testers included:
That having ‘Tara’s’ phone gave away too much information. It provides too much information and leaves less room for exploration.
As it currently stood, each different explanation for Tara’s ‘death’ did not hold equal weightage.
Fleshing out details - even ‘unnecessary’ ones - would help emphasise the ‘social media rabbit hole’ feeling and would make navigation more fun.
The Final Prototype
I analysed and incorporated feedback I received into the next iteration of my prototype. I restructured the narrative into the reader using their own phone and their interactions with their friend to figure out the story. I fleshed out details in the story and expanded on each narrative I wanted to construct.
The final prototype can be tested at the link or the embed below*:
* best viewed on a desktop or laptop computer.Continuing this project, I would like to work on the narrative - adding more details and perhaps more red herrings to the storylines. I would also like to work more on interactions between the reader and the friend, Tara.
I would also like to fine tune the user flow between different social media platforms and add better interactions.
Next Steps
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