Story Drifter

December 2009

The Story Drifter is a tool that allows a person or a group of people to construct a non-linear narrative based on the context of an event and its connections with surrounding information. Our proposed tool uses stories, photos, videos, historical artifacts, names, dates, and anything else that could help to illustrate not only what happened, but why it happened.

The Story Drifter builds a non-sequential narrative through images, words, video, and sound to provide a foundation from which the audience can make connections about the lesson. It encourages the audience to ask why an event happened, instead of simply asking them to memorize a set of facts about a particular event.

The Story Drifter fits into the classroom experience by allowing educators to comprehensively and intuitively teach about a topic on the fly. It can be used to present a planned lesson and can adapt to answer students' questions as they come up.

In addition to a large-scale, touch screen application, the software for the Story Drifter can be adapted for small-scale use on a computer screen. This will allow more individuals to use the Drifter as a tool for exploration since they won’t be limited to expensive, space-consuming equipment.

Story Drifter was a group project with Clint Beharry and Katie Koch.