Interviewer: Let's just keep going, Abbe. [Laughter] It's a coherent life story, we want to hear it all.

Abbe Don: OK. I started working on this interactive family album, which was originally called, "Something to Remember Her By", and it was originally based on a sort of prose poem that I wrote after my great-grandmother died. She died in 1984. I had written it in the context of a class with Louisa Valenzuela, who is one of the heir apparents of the authors of Latin American big-boom. It was like a very weird story, a story-poem.

That was originally the basis for a HyperCard stack that I built and it looked very book like. It had a couple of paragraphs with text on the left side, image on the right and you could go from card to card or page to page. It was pretty linear. But from any one of those pages, you could take these detours. I could draw you a diagram of this to a point, but this is very, very stiff. It really didn't feel a whole lot more interactive than the book. I was very disappointed and I was very stuck. I thought, "Oh, my God, I'm wrong. This medium and my ideas of storytelling AREN'T the perfect match."

Now, it just so happens that I was going off to Apple Computer that summer for an internship in a human interface group. They were working on a project called, "The Guides Project", which was intended to use little characters in the interface to help solve the problem that in a multimedia database, if everything is linked together, how do you know where to go next that is meaningful. So I had taken a look at that during an interview and said, "Well, you know, what you really need to do is have these little characters tell stories."

They hired me to come that summer to find out what it would be like to bring these characters to life. Brenda Laurel became my mentor of sorts. Her advice to me was, "Well, don't call it interactive fiction, call what you do interface design because then you can have a career."

So, this whole other world opened up to me because at NYU, the approach to what I was doing was very much coming from a kind of media/media arts perspective. So when you added sort of the computer science and human/computer interface….

Interviewer: Lexicon.

Abbe Don: Yeah, dialog, jargon, world-view, framework – there's a whole lot more possibilities in terms of how to sort of think about these things.

So, I gave myself the luxury of putting my master's thesis on hold. I just wasn't going to think about it. I was going to learn everything I could at Apple, knowing full well that stuff that I was doing at Apple was very closely related to my thesis and that ideas in my thesis were probably seeping into what I was doing there and what I was doing there would likely seep into what I did when I got back to NYU.

Back then, I wasn't nearly as savvy, sophisticated or concerned about the whole kind of intellectual property – blood brain barrier issue. It was all just, "neat-o ideas", all for the taking, all for the exploring.

So I worked really closely that summer with Brenda, Christie Rosenthal, and Tim Orin. We came up with a way to add a first person story. We took one of the characters, which [ABBE FILL IN] first person stories, based on journals and diaries and added, in effect, a new media type to their existing database. And, not dissimilar to what happened with my other project, it didn't work in that stories just sort of dangled off the articles. So everything in that particular design space, because it had started out as an encyclopedia, was sort of article-centric. Then the other media were kind of off in what we eventually called "media ghettos".

So, put the guide story on hold. One of the things that we do with the guides, though, was this multiple perspective concept. So I came back to NYU and realized, well, the story about my great-grandmother can't be told without also telling my grandmother, my mother and my stories because what's really, in a way compelling and sort of completes the journey, is the subsequent generations. So I started playing around with the layout that included having our pictures in an interface and also in making that original text story that I started with less of the dominant, sort of, driving structure.

Well, what eventually happened is that I lost the text story altogether. What I realized is that it was a wonderful story and that it needed to be read linearly. It was in that linear structure, it was in the narrative time. The story time was non-linear, but the actual experience for the user was a linear, several minute kind of reading experience. It was what it was. It didn't belong in this other piece. It was beyond screen.

That was a huge breakthrough. So "We Make Memories" ended up being only images and video. There's actually no text at all. Then another interesting thing that happened. Because I had this whole prototype structure hooked up in HyperCard that I put on to video disk. Three nights before my master's thesis was due, I got the video disk back. Unfortunately, the whole structure had been put together didn't work.

Interviewer: Hmm!

Abbe Don: The whole interface was just too stiff. I had this big work table with all my photographs spread out on them and I would spread them out chronologically and then do this little filter, like when I needed the mother/daughter pictures, I would collect them all up and do something with them. I wanted to work with the media just like how they were on the table. So that's when I came up with that scrolling time line concept.

It wasn't until after I graduated that Tim Orin and I sat down to unravel the work. I had like a number of long complicated, unruly if-then statements about video segments should play when. It was Tim who actually helped me come up with a data structure similar to what we did for the Guides project to create [Tape Break] ...model that I have, the [gears] model? I'll go show you that. But that was a big shift in my thinking about how the whole thing should be structured and architected, and that emerged after my internship at Apple.

So I had this very stiff structure at the beginning that I knew wasn't working, but I didn't know how I wanted to change it. Then I came up with this other conceptual model, which I had no ideal how to implement but I at least had the model. So it was taking that diagram, coupled with the interface that I had come up with, coupled with conversations with Tim, who actually knew how to do that type of programming, the dynamic engine and algorithm emerged for "We Make Memories." So that is that piece of the story.

Interviewer: : "We Make Memories" has a number of things that you've learned that I think inform all of your work. Can discuss the process, not only making it but, now, exhibiting it and expanding upon it, etc.

Abbe Don: Sure. There’s a couple of key things about "We Make Memories", just conceptually – which I probably touched on, but I'll highlight them.

One is the issue of multiple perspectives that you can represent almost concurrently on-screen in a way that I think is fundamentally different than what happens in a typical document, a linear documentary or ethnographic film. That's really crucial. It allows the user to explore the relationship between topic and time, and how stories unfold and trigger each other. That is something that's difficult to explain. It's a lot easier to show in terms of the user experience.

It's not just digital. It's, particularly, interactive storytelling. The only way that I know how to do interactive storytelling is to use a computer and a digital medium. That said, then the other thing that Brenda and I wrote about in the various Guides reports, and it was also really important about "We Make Memories", is that a lot of hypermedia (for lack of a better word), tended to have a user experience that felt like you were jumping around in space. Most of the metaphors that were used were spatial. You were in a virtual place or something like that. What was really important for me – and I'm still working on – is the idea of event [Tape Break] ...mutually exclusive, but that's really important.

Now, when I exhibit "We Make Memories", I recreate my great-grandmother's sitting room. Do you want me to describe that? Or do you want that for later?

Interviewer: Let's save that for later.

Abbe Don: OK. But what was really crucial about it was that when I exhibited, it would act – especially when I was with the exhibit, it would act as a catalyst for people to tell me their own family stories. I discovered that I was a victim in a way of my own rhetoric. In the rhetoric about interactive storytelling is the idea of the change in the relationship between the artist and the audience; what constitutes authoring or authorship – with a capital A.

I went back and wanted to create some mechanisms to capture people's stories, since this had acted as such an interesting and powerful catalyst and I realized, by the end of the day, my piece was closed. So I created a companion piece called "Share With Me A Story", and that was a separate kiosk that used a scanner and a voice digitizer and had a very simple four step process to scan your picture, add a caption, record your voice, and add your piece to the list of pieces. It was an interesting experiment. I discovered in that one that scanning a picture and telling a story and typing took too long.

So we did these video input things. There were a number of shortcomings. First of all, they required a lot of infrastructure in terms of exhibit set up. Most of the contexts that I was showing them, didn't lend themselves very well for people to tell their stories. It also required that people be in these locations, which were either galleries or trade shows or Rave parties. In the early '90s, Rave parties were a very good place to show interactive art work. They had sufficient grounded electricity. (An important historical note) [Laughter]

So, you had to be at a particular place at a particular time. There was always a bottleneck. People were interested in sharing their stories, which meant that there was less opportunity and less time for people to actually browse the stories once they were added. It was hard enough to scan one sheet, let alone trying to do multiple input or multiple viewing stations, although that would the obvious next place to go.

The worst part was probably that once these exhibits were over, there was no mechanism for sharing the exhibit again. So that's why when the World Wide Web became a viable publishing playing medium, I took that effort of using my own stories as a catalyst in creating a framework for the audience to participate in making stories.