INVENTIO - Theory and Practice of Designing Digital Genres for Learning and Leisure.

Despite the promise of technology, there are lags in the textual realisation of rich multimodal communication. We see three levels of digital media: hardware, software and genre as meaningware. We focus on genre in making meaning via digital media from a humanistic point of view. In research and development this is overlooked and overshadowed by mainstream approaches to HCI and digital media. Our media rich perspective situates genres and modes of communicating at the core of production based research and its further theorising. It follows earlier media and information systems design. Key theories are from various genre theories, e.g. film, fiction and interaction design, links between media, informatics and pedagogy, and situated in sociocultural approa ches to learning with ICTs. By developing a multidisciplinary and humanistically informed methodology for digital invention and design of multimodal and multimedia communication the project will collaboratively design prototyped digital genres. Consultati on will be between web and mobile developers, media, education and informatics researchers and designers and inputs from real life users in trialing and use. Development will take place in the education contexts from elementary school to university. Works will be contextualized for open-ended use in travel and tourism. Through collaboration with a digital map provider (and publisher of travelguides) and the Cultural History Museum we will build real and meaningful 'content' as will a mobile fictional narr ative and wiki. Narrative and pedagogical solutions to the problematic challenge of combining pre-edited multimodal documents (hypermedia nodes) with real time updates based positioning (GPS) will be studied and tested. Via genre it is possible to develop narrative, flexible wholes that make sense in changing environments. Interdisciplinary, practice based inquiry with analysis will accentuate humanistic research and contribute to approaches in HCI.