Dr. Carlos Scolari

Why and how are narrative worlds expanding across different media and platforms? What are the emerging features of transmedia consumption and production? What do these new forms of storytelling, product and service design and branding tell us about future convergence of culture and technology? Cross-media, multiple platforms, hybrid media, intertextual commodity, transmedial worlds, transmedial interactions, intermedia, multimodality, media convergence… the dictionary is open and we must learn how to read it. Meanwhile, the stories are blasting and expanding through different screens, surfaces and spaces. After presenting the main issues around these media experiences and analyzing an example of transmedia storytelling, participants will have the opportunity of expanding a fictional text and reflecting about the process.

About the speaker:
Dr. Carlos Alberto Scolari (b. Argentina, 1963) holds advanced degrees in Applied Linguistics and Communication Languages, and Social Communication/Journalism. He is Professor of Communication at University of Vic (Catalonia), Director of the Digital Interactions Research Group (GRID), Co-ordinator of the Master of Interactive Digital Communication program and of the Red Iberoamericana de Comunicación Digital (ALFA Programme UE-Latin America). In the 1990s Carlos collaborated with Ars Media (Torino, Italy) as interaction designer, developing interactive products in educational, commercial and institutional communication field. From 2000 to 2002 he ran the ID3: Interface, Information and Interaction Design program, organized by Istituto Europeo di Design and Ars Media (Italy), and supported by the MEDIA Programme (UE). Carlos has organized seminars and workshops on the semiotics of digital interaction, narrative and interaction design at European and Latin American universities and institutions. Learn more about Dr. Scolari athttp://www.hipermediaciones.com

What is an interface? Can interfaces be ‘transparent’? What are the relationships between different interfaces? Do they form a network? Can we apply an ecological model to interface evolution? What are the roles of users and designers in the ecology of interfaces? Interfaces have multiplied, and it is possible to find them not only in the analogical objects (the interface of a TV remote) and digital devices (a videogame interface) that surround us, but also as company-client interfaces. We should not be surprised if one day we find pedagogues talking about 'the teacher–student interface’. Any communicative interchange belongs to the interface universe. We could spend a lifetime talking about interfaces. And yet, while we strive to design, use, reflect, define, classify and write about them, interfaces continue to reproduce, contaminate and live a seemingly autonomous existence, far away from our theoretical ruminations.