Sample of the exercise cards from each category: technology, theme, technique, space, and the joker card.

Workshop goals and structure

The activity is aimed at helping participants to formulate study topics and/or inspire new concepts or research ideas.

The 90-minute workshop will

• introduce the resource and its context,
• followed by a creative exercise where participants will create new immersive and interactive concepts, prompted by the projects included in the timeline.

The Workshop structure is the following:
10 min exercise brief & grouping
20 min research the timeline
20-30 min ideate the concept
20-30 min sharing concepts between the groups

Downloads

Immersive_Arcade_workshop_cards_v1.0

Immersive Arcade timeline workshop documentation template

Immersive_Arcade_timeline_workshop_presentation_March-2022

Exercise brief

Your task is to ideate an immersive art or interactive concept.

You will be given a set of constraints in the form of cards that represent the various technologies, themes, spaces, and techniques employed in creating and distributing immersive content.

Setup

Get into groups of  2-4. (The exercise can be run individually as well.)

Each group will be dealt 5 cards. If you are doing the exercise by yourself, randomly pick one from each category and a joker card.

Each card represents a specific category: Technology, Theme, Space, and Technique.

In addition, there is the Joker card that lists all the elements across all cards and categories.

The Cards

Each card:

• states a particular element that belongs under that category,
• gives a brief description of the element, and importantly,
• points to an existing immersive art/game/installation on the timeline website.

The groups are encouraged to research the example projects for inspiration before starting to ideate their concept.

Rules

You need to build your concept based on the cards that you or your group is dealt.

= The Technology, Theme, Space, and Technique cards specify an aspect that you need to include in your concept.

The Joker allows you to add one, but only one, of these elements to your concept, or substitute one of them.

You need to document your concept using a template provided (see below).

A time constraint is optional but recommended. For example, limit the time for creating the concept (including researching the timeline) to approximately 45 minutes, and reserve 15-30 minutes for sharing results between groups.

Your input to the template will be the output of the exercise.

Tips for the group activity

Seek inspiration from the timeline examples

Try to first generate a volume of ideas without criticism

There are no stupid or wrong ideas!

= in ideation, quantity breeds quality!

After a while, stop generating ideas

…and evaluate them

and start narrowing down to what to build your concept on.

There are no correct answers – this is a creative exercise!

Suggested workflow

1. Familiarise with the cards you were dealt
2. Research the timeline examples mentioned in your cards
3. Generate ideas
4. Discuss ideas
5. Discuss ideas & build on them as a group
6. Document the concept