Transmedia Storytelling for Exposing Natural Capital and Promoting Ecotourism
Abstract
Humanity benefits from natural ecosystems in a multitude of ways; collectively, these are known as ecosystem services. Our project investigates how storytelling, coupled with mobile interactive technologies, can be used to design interventions that bring awareness and engage people in understanding the benefits of ecosystems and their underlying biodiversity. “Fragments of Laura” a technology mediated transmedia story, reveals to its audience (mostly tourists) information related to the local natural capital and ecosystem services of a UNESCO-protected forest, and embodies many aspects of its history, culture and ecotourism potential. In this paper, we present the overall interaction and story design, together with the results from the “Fragments of Laura” experience prototype. We conclude with a description of the future work and how the results from the experience prototype will affect the final working prototype.
Keywords
Analyses and evaluation of systems Methods for testing story development Ecosystem services Interactive digital narrativeNotes
Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge our fellow researchers Julian Hanna, Rui Trindade, Sandra Câmara, Dina Dionisio and the support of LARSyS (Projeto Estratégico LA 9 - UID/EEA/50009/2013). The project has been developed as part of the MITIExcell (M1420-01-0145-FEDER-000002). The author Mara Dionisio wishes to acknowledge Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia for supporting her research through the Ph.D. Grant PD/BD/114142/2015.
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