After exploring performance design in my undergraduate degree, I conceived the Story Starter as an interactive theatre. One version would be an overlapping book with the content including imagery of characters, scenery backdrops, and stage props. The second version would be a box to imitate the theatre stage, wings and fly tower with the content including imagery and die cuts of characters, scenery and props.

 

The intention was to teach young elements of theatre productions in an interactive way with scenery element descending from the top while character and stage props were unveiled from the sides through the theatre wings. I was trying to capture the transformative and transitional aspect of a theatre performance but it was difficult to incorporate the element of lighting, music and cast interaction.

 

Since I was also fond of writing fiction, I decided to take the essence of the initial interactive theatre idea—creating stories in an interactive manner—and simplify the concept into my Story Starter prototypes.  In essence, these are physical and tactile 'story prompt generators'.  Below, you can learn more about the process and experimentation I went through to develop two different prototypes.