Interactive Documentaries Informing Design

The field of design research, thinking, and practice relies on various mediums and methods (Hanington, 2003) to improve the designs of products, services, and experiences. Even though the use of video and digital media has been studied within the design field, the use of interactive documentaries (i.e., I-docs) remains unexplored. Aston, Gaudenzi, and Rose (2017) define I-docs as “any project that starts with the intention to engage with the real and that uses digital interactive technology to realize this intention,” as they consider 'real' as "the breadth of lived experience". Interactive documentaries can be non-linear in the way that they present documented experiences, co-creative in making, and polyphonic by involving multiple perspectives (Aston & Odorico, 2018). These qualities of interactive documentaries make them interesting as a medium. Aiming to answer the question "How can I-docs be helpful to the design field?" the study conducts a literature review that looks at the uses of interactive documentaries and the existing design research methods. The study is particularly interested in user-centered design and co-design as two main design approaches. The reviewed papers were subjected to qualitative content analysis to understand the patterns between what existing methods in design research provide and what interactive documentaries can offer. The user-centered design approach focuses on the user and relies on user research to understand the user experience. And co-design is where the "users" are considered "co-designers." Interactive documentaries offer potential uses for both of these design approaches. For the user-centered design approach, the stages of design thinking were used as a structure to see how each of these steps can be improved by utilizing interactive documentaries. Design thinking is known to have five main stages that are iterative and non-linear: empathize (researching your users' needs), define (stating the users' needs and problems), ideate (challenging assumptions and creating ideas), prototype (starting to create solutions), and test (trying the solutions). In light of this, the paper proposes potential uses of I-docs in the first three stages of design thinking. The study argues that interactive documentaries can be used to document and present the user experience in a unique way. When compared to other user data collection methods, the interactive documentary stands out since it can retell user experiences in an in-depth and non-linear way by showing different perspectives and including multiple stakeholders. So, I-docs can inform the design process by supporting the "empathize" stage. Secondly, I-docs can help to compare these multiple perspectives and help designers form a design focus in the "define" stage. Lastly, I-docs can challenge assumptions regarding what the users need and can be stimulating for thinking about various concepts to support the "ideate" stage. In the context of co-design, interactive documentaries can be made co-creatively, as evident by the many works noted by Cizek and Uricchio (2022), making them a co-designed medium. Therefore, I-docs can be a catalyst for co-design processes. This work aspires to spark a conversation between I-docs and design and invite other researchers to explore the opportunities between the fields.