Movement Oriented Design (MOD)

 Movement Oriented Design uses story-telling concepts for multimedia authoring. Some of these concepts come from screenplay writing principles. It provides a framework for creating multimedia experience by focusing on three facets: motivation, need and structure, which form the why, what and how of multimedia authoring.

Why / Motivation: The motivation facet directs a project by formulating the project concept as a series of questions, because, only when we ask the right questions, can we get the right answers. We start with a problem statement, break it down into subproblems and look for solutions by telling a story that solves these problems. This concept is similar to the idea used by Phillips and Huntley in developing the Dramatica authoring paradigm and software.

What / Need: The need facet explores what the user wants. The generic answer is: to get emotional movement. Users crave emotional engagement and stimulation. Consequently, systems that manage to achieve this emotional movement succeed; and the best way to achieve emotional movement is through story telling.

Let us first explore emotional movement from a humanistic story perspective. As viewers come out of a good movie crying or laughing, they often say, “That was so moving”. They are talking of emotional movement. Students coming out of a good lecture may not say that it was moving, however, they have gone through a similar experience. Their experience probably began with anticipation, was followed by discoveries, and ended in a new understanding; making it a moving experience. A good multimedia presentation must achieve emotional movement.

How / Structure: To facilitate the creation of a moving story we view each story as an ensemble of story units. In addition, each story unit has three parts: Begin, Middle, and End (BME). This follows the axiom given by Aristotle in his Poetics, that every story must have a beginning, middle and an ending. The beginning (termed Begin) of a story unit lays the groundwork. A good Begin should hook the user, and arouse desire to find out more. Middle should convey the main story message. The End should provide a natural termination; it should conclude the current story unit, and / or link to the next story unit. Any story unit that does not have exactly these three parts is incomplete. Finding effective Begins and Ends is always more challenging than creating the Middles.

Screenplays consist of three acts, which form the BME of the overall story. Each act comprises a number of sequences; each sequence is made-up of scenes. In the current screenplay writing practice, the scene is used as the atomic story element and it changes whenever there is a sudden change in location or time. With Movement Oriented Design, we can further divide scenes into story Movements. The word Movement is used to signify that each of these sub-scenes must move the story. In music, the term movement refers to “a principle self-contained section of a symphony, sonata etc.” (Penguin, 1982). A Story Movement must be self-contained; i.e. it must be a micro-story with BME components.

A story works if its Movements work. And a Movement works if its BME components fulfill their function: Begin creates a sense of anticipation, Middle reveals the main message, and the End gives a sense of closure. In addition, the End, wherever possible, should link to the Begin of the next Movement. By linking these Movements in a cause and effect relationship we can create stories that keep the users interested in the narrative. Just as we can create a moving humanistic story, we can create a moving story of any other type, including a multimedia story.

Story Development: To develop a multimedia story, we start by stating its story problem, and propose a solution by identifying, in broad terms, its BME components. Next, we can take each component, and break it down into sub-components, each having its own BME structure. We follow this process until we arrive at the story Movements. Finding suitable navigation path(s) through these Movements give us either a single story or a collection of alterative stories.

Navigation: Interactive multimedia design presents a level of complexity much higher than that of a linear multimedia presentation. By breaking the entire story into Movements it becomes possible to create a structure where the Movements are linked non-linearly. Different navigation paths provide different solutions to the various story problems. Movement Oriented Design helps in managing the complexity of creating nonlinear interactive multimedia system.

Thus, succinctly, the Movement Oriented Design methodology predicates that we can create emotional movement by taking a story problem and developing it into a sequence of connected Movements; where each Movement is a complete story unit with BME components. These Movements can be linked linearly or non-linearly for interactive systems.