Market Garden
Pillsbury, Christine
I've been spending so much of my time here at MassArt experimenting with "Interactive Narrative" -- trying to find useful ways to essentially treat the qualitative as quantitative. Dissecting the aspects of story and trying to create "systems" that will produce meaningful dynamic experiences.
But what if I turned the tables? Perhaps that would help inform my direct thesis studies. What if I attempted an experiment that would take quantitative data and tried to make a qualitative system out of it? That's where the idea for the Market Garden came from. I like to call it a story-phor... If a metaphor is the narrative for something static, then a story-phor is a metaphor over time, with cause and effect rules, or situations.
The market garden is a dynamic visual interface for the "average joe" stock trader. By using the story-phor of a garden -- plant growth, death, pollination, bright sky, cloudy sky, the functions of plant (buy), dig (sell), and rake (trade) -- a user can "digest" the complex information of a stock portfolio without loosing the necessary detailed information. Plus, it's fun -- I keep saying "This would be BIG in Asia", we'll see.