SEOUL ‘ 23
2023
Design Challenge:
The challenge for this project was to create an interactive storytelling experience about food. I decided to take creative liberty and focus more on exercising and nutritional values.
My approach:
Luckily, a good friend of mine, Hans Meulblok, has ran a half marathon in Seoul, South-Korea. We took some time out of our schedules to get together and talk about his inpsiring experiences. Aside from making something with educative and entertaining purposes, I also focused on making a personal experience for Hans easy to share with others.
With both Hans and mine experience in the field of game design: I visualized his journey through a late 90’s extreme sports game! By clicking on certain elements, you can progress through this ‘game’ and digitally experience a half marathon! In this ‘game’, you can also track Hans’s energy & hydration values and see exactly what he eats during this 22KM run!
Process:
During the making of this visualization I played around with different mediums for how to get Hans’s story across. First, I wanted to make a interactive poster, which uses scrollytelling to tell a story to the user. However, I quickly got bored of this idea as I found it quite overused and didn’t exactly suit the way I wanted to tell my story.
I truly wanted to make the user ‘experience’ the marathon if they were there, with it being in South-Korea and all. Scrollytelling wasn’t a good way to sell this feeling.
I decided to trace the route Hans walked during his half-marathon on Google Earth and noted the points of interest he came across.
I took screenshots of the environment and took these into Adobe Illustrator to visualize the route in a unique style, being this 90’s esque east-asian visual style, placing a lot of focus onto ‘cute’ and big elements, resulting in the video shown above.
The first visualized version of the ‘scrollytelling’ approach
