Beyond the Screen
| Module title | Beyond the Screen |
|---|---|
| Module code | EASM202 |
| Academic year | 2025/6 |
| Credits | 30 |
| Module staff | Dr Amy Cutler (Convenor) |
| Duration: Term | 1 | 2 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration: Weeks | 11 |
| Number students taking module (anticipated) | 16 |
|---|
Module description
Interactive storytelling takes place across a wide range of situations, applications, and non-desk-based industries. This module will develop your skills in interactive storytelling design that seeks to interpose the digital and analogue worlds or to go beyond the screen(s) of game engines and web media: including augmented and virtual reality, interactive installations, locative narrative art and transmedia projects. You will consider the interplay of human bodies and performances, digital technologies and physical environments as hybrid platforms of story-led interaction. You will experiment with technologies that facilitate these experiences, such as mobile AR, projection mapping, Arduino sensors, and microprocessors and controllers.
Module aims - intentions of the module
This module will develop and examine a core set of five concepts shaping interactive storytelling design across non-desk-based situations and contexts: agency, liveness, location, embodiment, and spatiality. These range from high tech experiences – such as live and expanded cinema, geo-location and interactive installation – to lower tech but no less complex story engines based around presence, such as situational games, ambient literature, and black-box LARP. We will experiment with the five overlapping principles and investigate the challenges and opportunities they pose for dramaturgy and design “beyond the screen”.
This module will culminate in an assessment in the form of a short live event which will allow you to demonstrate critical approaches to ‘immersion’, ‘atmosphere’, and ‘audience’, and tailor these approaches in an appropriate and effective workflow for the project at hand.
Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
ILO: Module-specific skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 1. Demonstrate a range of practical and technical skills for interactive experience design in a range of non-desk-based spaces and industries, and apply these effectively and appropriately in context
- 2. Demonstrate advanced critical knowledge of key concepts and theories in contemporary interactive design, including ideas of immersion and liveness
ILO: Discipline-specific skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 3. Examine and analyse the devices of effective and impactful storytelling in relation to space, place, and audience
- 4. Critically dissect issues of culture, narrative and representation with appropriate critical and professional terminology
ILO: Personal and key skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 5. Demonstrate autonomous skills for building a practical workflow when responding to a brief, evidencing the organised use of relevant and appropriate technologies
- 6. Translate complex narrative into designed experiences according to the needs of different scenarios, stakeholders, and audiences, as well as diverse pathways in the industry
Syllabus plan
Each week of the module will focus on a different context for interactive narrative, extending your understanding of storytelling spaces across new tools and environments. We will examine how shared critical concepts reoccur across different situations, building both your critical and design languages. This module is both practice-based and theory-based, and you will develop your technical capacities for producing themed and purposeful experience design for diverse spaces, audiences, and interactions.
While we will encounter different names for specific practices out ‘in the wild’ in this module – geo-caching, imagineering, guerrilla projection, placemaking, creative fieldwork – these will be driven by shared questions around the place and movement of the audience and modes of spatial or site-sensitive design for participatory and imaginative experience. This module is relevant for building your portfolio skills at the cross-disciplinary intersections of the field and its stakeholders, from science communication and museum work to medical / therapeutic arts and play, architectural design, and theories of public space and interpretation.
Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities | Guided independent study | Placement / study abroad |
|---|---|---|
| 22 | 278 | 0 |
Details of learning activities and teaching methods
| Category | Hours of study time | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled learning and teaching | 22 | 2 hour seminars x 11 |
| Guided independent study | 99 | Independent research: 9 hrs weekly reading, playing and viewing of online resources |
| Guided independent study | 150 | Independent and collaborative making, designing, and practical development |
| Guided independent study | 29 | Assessment prep |
Formative assessment
| Form of assessment | Size of the assessment (eg length / duration) | ILOs assessed | Feedback method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interim assessment: idea pitch | 5-10 minutes | 1-6 | Tutor and cohort feedback via seminars |
Summative assessment (% of credit)
| Coursework | Written exams | Practical exams |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 0 | 0 |
Details of summative assessment
| Form of assessment | % of credit | Size of the assessment (eg length / duration) | ILOs assessed | Feedback method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Event assessment | 60 | Installation/event (time and place will be scheduled) | 1, 3, 5, 6 | Feedback sheet with opportunity for tutorial follow-up |
| Reflective commentary | 40 | Demonstration of workflow; critical reflection on use of appropriate tools; comparison to other examples | 2, 3, 4 | Feedback sheet with opportunity for tutorial follow-up |
Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)
| Original form of assessment | Form of re-assessment | ILOs re-assessed | Timescale for re-assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Event assessment (60%) | Event assessment (60%) | 1, 3, 5, 6 | Ref/def period |
| Reflective commentary (40%) | Reflective commentary (40%) | 2, 3, 4 | Ref/def period |
Re-assessment notes
Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.
Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 50%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 50%.
Indicative learning resources - Basic reading
Indicative reading (further reading lists will be provided):
- Jenny Kidd & Alke Gröppel-Wegener, Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling (Routledge, 2019)
- CT Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (OUP, 2020)
- Margaret Kerrison, Reimagined Worlds: Narrative Placemaking for People, Play, and Purpose (ORO Editions, 2024)
- Rebecca Hackemann, 3-D Experimental VR and Art Practices: Untangling Another Dimension (Intellect, 2023)
- Giuliana Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
- Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 1999)
- Gabriel Menotti, Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies (OUP, 2020)
- Brian Upton, Situational Game Design (Routledge, 2017)
- Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Columbia University Press, 2013)
- Gregor H. Mews, Transforming Public Space Through Play (Routledge, 2022)
- Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla eds., Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres (Transcript Publishing, 2010)
| Credit value | 30 |
|---|---|
| Module ECTS | 15 |
| Module pre-requisites | EASM199 Foundations and Frontiers |
| Module co-requisites | EASM203 Interactive Storytelling Project |
| NQF level (module) | 7 |
| Available as distance learning? | No |
| Origin date | 11/04/2025 |
