The Pararchive Project

“…it’s a framework in which to create. I’m a big designer. When I write a screenplay, I’ve diagrammed the architecture of the story. There’s really got to be a structure; art demands it.” More at… Boyhood director Richard Linklater shares his keys to great storytelling

It’s easy to become cynical about the current fashion of story as the metaphor for everything from politics to religion to marketing to design. Indeed, I find myself rolling my eyes as another story-centric service is launched at us. However story is at the heart of Pararchive and Yarn and for a good reason. Dean…

Though Pararchive’s origins lie in the exploration of archives and heritage, we realised at a very earlier stage that the route through this was storytelling. We always knew that personal narratives and biographies would help to locating our users in what might be otherwise overwhelmingly voluminous collections and historical contexts. I think most of us understand that writing…

  Pararchive was recently invited to take part in the Festival of Ideas in Rusholme, Manchester. More commonly known as the Rusholme Festival of Ideas – which I will henceforth abbreviate as (RFoI) in this piece, the event provided an opportunity for local communities and people to map their ideas and perspectives of how they…

We have always had the notion of Pararchive stories inhabiting a tapestry of connected tales – with characters, places, objects, institutions and times as their connective threads. With the notion of serendipity at the core of our design philosophy, our hope was that these threads would allow new narrative patterns, paths and perspectives to emerge both organically and explicitly. Lately I’ve…

  Pararchive won a small grant to participate in this year’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Science which took place from 1st – 8th November. The aim of the Festival was to showcase some of the “leading” social science research being undertaken across the country and to demonstrate how such work…

Wow, Microsoft has also jumped on the storytelling bandwagon with Sway, a typically beige, Redmond-ian attempt to make Microsoft Office relevant to a world in which Powerpoint is a pejorative. Sway allows users to collate images, text and other media from their own devices, the web and social media, orchestrating them into ‘cloud’ presentations. The video below depicts a designer being…

When they’re good, the words that make apps work are a holistic part of the product, not a decorative swirl on top. If we’re going to claim to tell stories with our products, it’s time to wake up and pay sustained, deliberate attention to the language that guides users through them. medium.com/re-form/what-is-narrative-ux-9400664660af

Seeing this kind of consideration for storytelling on the web is a serious about face. Not because writers and designers haven’t cared about storytelling, but because we may be past the point where they could still be successful despite not caring. Offhandedly dumping text into a column on a webpage used to pass for an…

The Uralla Story Project is a partnership between Uralla Arts, The Story Project and the communities that comprise the Uralla district. The project has, in its initial phase, recorded over forty conversations on a wide range of topics. These are everyday stories which weave an extraordinary web of connectivity across our community. We thank the…