Traduzione e media

The narratives and the supports.
Remediating Design Culture in the translation of transmedia artefacts

Media culture has fostered over the last century an incessant proliferation of ideas, models, and artefacts that have defined specific milestones and precise references for designers, researchers, and professionals in several disciplines. Since the mid ’80s, an increasing transdisciplinarity, the ability to experiment more effective techniques, the widespread diffusion of specific tools, and a worldwide network to interconnect emerging knowledge and skills redefined the contents production and consumption.
The growth of social-driven patterns based on bottom-up collaboration, interchanging format of distributions and consumption, connective intelligence, and sharing economy fostered the rise of participative audiences and the emergence of transmedia narratives (Jenkins et al. 2006).
The paradigm shift of the realism of the forms (Flusser, 1997), the growth of crowdsourced and crowdfunded business models (Surowiecki, 2004), accessibility as a protocol not only for consumption but for development (Steve, 2004; Lessig 2004), the birth of a new Software Cultures (Manovich, 2010), are some of the passages towards the definition of hybrid artefacts, collectively built and sometimes opened to narrow but very specific audiences.
Transmedia artefacts are one of the first concrete results of this change of perspective. Over the past 50 years it has been possible to witness the birth of such transmedia experiments and artefacts (The Magus by John Fowles, 1965; Ong’s Hat, 1980). From subsequent projects (like Inanimate Alice, 2005, and The Cosmonaut, 2013), the designer’s work becomes a process of hybrid and interconnected teams.
This paper aims at detecting the grassroots and the role of design culture in the definition of transmedia artefacts, showing how designers’ skills move towards a translation of the narrative elements not only in terms of adaptation from one support to another, or from one idiom to a new one, but mainly setting up crossed strategies of cultural “remediation” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000).

The narratives and the supports.
Remediating Design Culture in the translation of transmedia artefacts
in Proceedings of DRS 2016: Design + Research + Society – Future-Focused Thinking, 50th Anniversary International Conference, Volume 3. Editors: Peter Lloyd & Erik Bohemia
Brighton (UK), 27-30/06/2016

www.drs2016.org