TechVista is Micrsoft Research India’s annual symposium, that brings together and features people whose work defines new directions in technology and science.This year, TV was held at the Westin, in Pune, India on the 21st of Jan. I had the wonderful opportunity to actually be part of and work with a fantastic team whose project was demo-ed this time. Ours was the DigitalNarratives team and we worked very hard, over the period of four months to pull it off. Some of the other projects that were demoed can be found here.

A digital narrative is a narrative that takes advantage of multimedia and web technologies, providing the author with a new way to build and present a media-rich story, and simultaneously offering the viewer a new way to interact with the content. Microsoft Research India, along with key partners, are currently developing a new technology called Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) that enables creation of digital narratives.

RIN <Rich Interactive Narratives> to me, as an artist and designer, is a great tool to tell compelling stories. Once released, I believe it will change people’s multimedia experiences. RIN is a Techonology which would eventually let all types of digital media unite and can be tied into the form of a story narration or movie.It enables the author (creator) to construct information and media heavy stories/narratives and infact, define the interactions the user experiences when viewing the story. While the design team was mainly focused on creating amazing content for the narrative, we got first-hand experience working with the tool. This was my first official foray into the world of interaction and experience design, and interesting enough, it threw open a space where one could examine of the role of designers in tech research. While the creative/design peeps brought in various skills such as story-boarding, photography, illustration, editing etc that was fully focused on content generation, the dev.  (development) team worked towards creating a more robust tool. The marriage of the two, left brain and right was perfect.

From a geeky perspective, quoting Nikhil Chandran, Project Manager, DigitalNarratives – “All the projects that i have worked on, the outlook towards the whole engagement has been based on the following assumptions:

1. The scope is defined
2. The time is fixed

Jinal Shah is a digital strategist and works for Electric Artists in NYC. She describes herself as a thinker, writer and storyteller and jots down her thoughts in her blog - Constant Beta. She also started a blog called Dsplaced that aggregates stories from people and talks about their sense of displacement from home and country. She spoke to Designwala about innovation in India through incremental change. She also talks about examples where storytelling has been used in education, women’s empowerment and social change.