David Meyers

Tim Broadwater

F**k, Marry, or Kill

Ux : Fmk : User Experience

The struggle for meaning, reflection, and self-understanding is an important process of human development. Throughout human history didactic art – art wherein the central purpose is to instruct the viewer – has been developed to aid this human function. Focusing primarily on the didactic art of fairytales, however, one can see that the dominant role of reflection and self-understanding is lost in contemporary translation. The role of the viewer/reader of the fairytale, contemporarily, has been switched from one of inner reflection to that of passive absorption. This thesis project will argue that reflection and self-understanding (on the part of the viewer) can best be restored to the fairytale through the use of hypermedia, as well as the artist adopting an art-activist approach to art production.

Activating the Didactic, Self-Reflective Fairytale through Hypermedia As a Model for the Art Education Activist

Media overgeneralization fosters a lack of connectedness, socialization, and understanding of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA) community. Persons of the LGBTQIA community are very much impacted by design campaigns, and by examining the communication strategies that occur within specific campaigns, potential solutions can be discovered to positively impact the community’s perception. Visual communicators are well equipped with design skillsets to develop and prototype experiences to benefit the LGBTQIA community; likewise, visual communicators possess comparable skillsets to gamification practitioners, which use game mechanics and game thinking to engage users to solve problems. Furthermore, it’s possible to utilize design, gamification, and usability principles in the context of a group participatory medium, rather than sole-interactive medium, to develop an effective model to affect social change. A group participatory medium, such as a cooperative tabletop game, can be deigned to facilitate learning opportunities – through a combination of European user interface (UI) and American user experience (UX) design principles – to advance acceptance, connectedness, and understanding. Therefore, by employing design, gamification, and usability principles through an iterative design process – one that encompasses usability testing or ‘play testing’ – it’s possible to develop a cooperative experience that facilitates understanding of LGBTQIA people.

Tim Broadwater

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