Transmedia Change by Kevin Moloney (Ball State University, USA)

This book examines and illustrates the use of design principles, design thinking, and other empathy research techniques in university and public settings, to plan and ethically target socially-concerned transmedia stories and evaluate their success through user experience testing methods.

All media industries continue to adjust to a dispersed, diverse, and dilettante mediascape where reaching a large global audience may be easy but communicating with a decisive and engaged public is more difficult. This challenge is arguably toughest for communicators who work to engage a public with reality rather than escape. The chapters in this volume outline the pedagogy and practice of design, empathy research methods for story development, transmedia logics for socially-concerned stories, development of community engagement and the embrace of collective narrative, art and science research collaboration, the role of mixed and virtual reality in prosocial communication, ethical audience targeting, and user experience testing for storytelling campaigns. Each broad topic includes case examples and full case studies of each stage in production.

Offering a detailed exploration of a fast-emerging area, this book will be of great relevance to researchers and university teachers of socially-concerned transmedia storytelling in fields such as journalism, documentary filmmaking, education, and activism.

Kevin Moloney is Assistant Professor in the Center for Emerging Media Design and Development at Ball State University, USA. He researches transmedia storytelling in journalism, documentary, activism, and other socially-concerned genres. For 20 years, he was a regular contributor to the New York Times covering the Rocky Mountain region of the United States and Latin America. He visually reported more than 960 stories for the Times, 50 of which appeared on page 1. His work has also appeared in news magazines worldwide, including National Geographic, Time, Stern, and Paris Match.