Transmedia Storytelling: Addressing Futures Communication Challenges with Video Animation

Transmedia storytelling represents a process of communicating integral parts of a narrative across multiple delivery channels. Within the futures field this technique is being recognized as a potential instrument when determining how to present information in futures-oriented projects. Foresight professionals and researchers are often faced with the challenge of communicating large amounts of data generated through qualitative methods such as interviews, interpretive narration, and oral history at the end of a research project. While the process of disseminating research is every research’s obligation, communicating key insights gained from futures-related research, and presenting these in other formats that effectively extend the research results and new knowledge gained to nonexpert audiences, remains a key challenge. The purpose of this research is to address this gap in the literature by answering the question of how to communicate futures scenarios to nonexpert audiences, corporate decision-makers, and their organizational teams using transmedia storytelling techniques and video animation as a medium. The four-step process presented in this paper is based on a use case in which academics and designers, at a design school, took the findings of a financial services futures study and applied storytelling and visualization techniques to bring futures scenarios to life with video animation.