I have to say, I’m pretty psyched about this one, y’all. For the last project in this class at Maryland College Institute of Art, I’m working on a text-based interactive game using Figma for prototyping, the goal of which is to encourage the user to take seriously my proposition: that college students should consider pairing humanities and STEM for the new, hybrid economy. The audience? New or prospective students, especially those who lean toward STEM but have no real knowledge of the value and purpose of a humanities degree, and little sense of what you can do with such a degree. However, I also imagine using this in a gateway humanities course that would help teach students how to approach their degree–or at least provide some interesting frameworks and possibilities for imagining a new humanities degree.
I have done text-based games before using Twine, and Figma is more frequently used to prototype apps before being passed off to a back-end developer who makes it work with your APIs and whatnot. But as I was exploring, I thought this was a great way to create a branching narrative, with some really great options for controlling appearance with assets and components and styles.
I’m using Illustrator to create the charts, some of which you can see in the screenshot above, with data from a rather vasty array of sources (stay tuned for the finished version, and you can check them out!).
I’m fully down the rabbit hole….
Tonya Howe 