Abstract - 2nd draft

WORKING TITLE: Visual interactive design: narrative, social, spatial and temporal

Abstract
This paper will explore, from a visual communication perspective, the challenge of designing a graphical user interface for an online interactive product that takes into account interactivity, narrative and user-control in order to facilitate user-participation. I am specifically interested in how graphic design can visually record the linking traces that socially, spatially and temporally map contributors to an online project. These linking traces often can be narratives left by online projects' contributors.

How can these narratives be graphically represented? Once represented can each individual narrative form a larger narrative, creating a meta-narrative, shaped and formed by anyone who cares to interact with it? Can a visual language develop that clearly illustrates and communicates this data?

Focusing upon a practical pilot study this paper scrutinizes these questions through the design evolution of an online graphical user interface. It analyses and evaluates the submission, engagement and manipulation of user-contributed content within a digital environment and identifies which of the four narrative structures (Jenkins 2004) in its underlying narrative architecture is prevalent.

My research position is shaped by a desire to explore the graphic aspect of graphical user interfaces rather than from the technology/HCI/computer science disciplines. This paper adds to the discourse on how interactions can be facilitated by better graphic design, in order to expand visual communication literature and application to practice.

-------

This is a slightly reworked draft and is the abstract I submitted for critique and peer assessment. I'll feedback the comments I get in a later post.