The Pararchive Project

Earlier today Dean came across an old Made By Many project for ITV, Sir Trevor. The app is essentially an editing tool for web content, released as an open source project. It’s actually a curious mix of some of the storyblocks metaphors we’ve been designing Pararchive around. Where Pararchive is a series of blocks with attached metadata and media…

The UN’s High Commission for Refugees recently launched Tracks, a Medium-esque collection of stories on refugees and aid workers. The collection of twenty-four stories documents the impact of UNHCR’s work in distressed communities and conflict zones across the planet; everything from themes of migration, education hope and faith to places as far flung as Angola and Syria. The…

  Following on from the First World War Engagement Centres Everyday Lives in War and Hidden Histories we now look at Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its legacy. Voices of War – or Voices as it will be referred to henceforth in this piece – is based in the Library of…

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…

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…

Everything happens in the mind of the player – the main character of the story. Part radio play, part interactive storytelling, ROOM is inspired by analogue, literary based computer games like Dungeons and Dragons & Interactive Fiction. In these, the player makes decisions that lead them through a variety of pre-determined adventures. However, in ROOM,…

I’ve tried to set up Cowbird to be a timeless project, as opposed to a timely project. Cowbird tries to encourage a deeper, more personal, longer lasting kind of self-expression than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Internet. It doesn’t necessarily follow all of the latest design trends, but hopefully it’s a space that…

Earlier this month, members of the wider Pararchive team were invited to host a 90-minute breakout session on our project at the Connected Communities festival. I closed the segment with some reflections on our approach to design & community storytelling; here’s my talk… Hey everyone, my name is Imran Ali. I’m one of the founders of Carbon Imagineering, a digital…

Following the Connected Communities festival Fiona and I headed over to Madlab to join Bokeh Yeah for their monthly meetup. This session was to be dedicated to hearing pitches for the group’s documentary challenge for Pararchive, then allowing the group to select four ideas that will go on to be produced. The competing ideas included…

At last week’s Connected Communities Festival, we finally met some of the team behind Tangible Memories, notably Tim Lloyd-Yeates from their project partner Alive! The project is using stories, artefacts and media to help improve the quality of life for the elderly in care homes; what struck me immediately were the parallels between our co-design workshops for Pararchive and their…