STRP online guide
Designing a guide for an online festival in pandemic times.
In 2021 affect lab was commissioned to design a virtual guide for the STRP digital arts festival that took place online due to the pandemic. The brief was to re-design the experience of a regular “tour guide” and re-frame it for an online art festival audience. The guide had to appeal to regular festival audiences and schools tours. We were guided by two primary questions:
How do we re-design a tour guide for online audiences that remains educational, interactive and with a feeling of personal attention?
How can an online guide connect visitors, give them a sense of community and togetherness at the festival?
We researched online tools, bots and looked into interactive designs to create new forms of interaction. We tested these with the two audience groups. Together with technologist Arjan Scherpenisse we built and integrated the online guide into the STRP exhibition.
The result was a quirky online chatbot guide. Complete with a wicked sense of humour, the bot welcomes visitors as they arrive on the festival site. During the tour the bot plays with conversation techniques and decision making to guide visitors in a fun way through the STRP festival. Visitors had a sense of others being on the tour with them and had the chance to interact with each other.
STRP is an annual international digital arts festival based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. They aim to open dialogue with the public, artists, designers, media makers and thinkers about the relationship between people, experimental technology, society and the future.
Screenshot of the online tour guide
“At a time when pupils and students were incredibly screen-weary, during STRP Festival 2021 we still took on the challenge with affect lab to make an online expo innovative and engaging. affect lab developed an online tour through a bot that took young people through the artworks with information, interaction and humour. With their expertise in storytelling and interaction, they created amazing various virtual routes and managed to surprise young people and also other visitors with a quirky virtual guide.”