Interaction - Bachelor

A Road I Had Known

A Road I Had Known is a narrative installation that explores loneliness and loss, reinvention and wonder, and the in-between of it all. Using fragmented diary entries, objects left behind from a time long before us, and immersive soundscapes that play around the user as they explore, it examines how nostalgia exists as the lens through which we colour in the gaps of what we remember. It asks us to slow down, stay a while, and consider whether a life can be understood through the pieces left behind.

Jamie Corrie

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the pieces we leave behind

The narrative is staged as five boxes capturing a moment in time of a life being packed up and the pieces being left behind. Fragmented diary entries, and thoughts that were never quite finished, allow the user to put the scattered belongings back together and piece together what happened during one summer across forgotten state lines in 1993. While some things are easier to put back together, there are heavier, unspoken pieces that wrestle with truth and forgotten dreams which we may not yet have the answers to put back together.

The Story

This installation turns the light towards pieces from a time gone before us. It tells the story of a far off place through five acts across boxes that probably never meant much to anyone else looking in. It tells a story off the map of two sides to the same coin, and their crusade to live as they are across the years. Unpacking what has been left behind reveals the echoing sounds of wind over fields, bells tolling on the hill, and other sounds from the memories of days which, as all things do, blurred together in the end.

The weight of the events each box contains is embodied and revealed using a concealed RFID scanner, to trigger the corresponding soundscape which surrounds the user as they read through the scattered memories. Using old physical media, everyday artefacts, moments captured on film, and handwritten entries, it puts a lens to two lives on the outskirts which went unobserved and the one summer that brought that never-ending road into rushing focus.

That road was only big enough to wave hello or goodbye to one poor soul at a time.

Inspiration

Across all the faces I’ve known over the years, especially ones going through this transitional period of emerging adulthood, it was rare they did not all have their own story to tell about feeling in-between or like a wanderer in their own life. Given how fast things move, storytelling has always been a chance, no matter how many generations go past, to slow down and see things through the eyes of others. This was what inspired my design and writing of this project.

I wanted to make something we could not just read, but feel and hear around us and that drew from the simplest things around us which we don’t always take notice of but that make our thoughts and memories evermore tangible and therefore more lived in. I wanted to design an experience that put a light to a time before us, and to a place somewhere far off, because human connection and how we spend our days seeking out our own meaning, is something every generation before us can relate to and the answer to it has always been far from black and white. This project reminds people, as they strive to know what it means to belong, that someone, in some far off place, has once felt the same as they do.

Background track: State Lines – Novo Amor. Music used for artistic purposes only.

In the end, maybe it’s about staying lost a while longer and drawing a little further outside the lines. Maybe it’s about knowing you were here and that it mattered…

Jamie Corrie

Jamie is an Interaction Designer who has a passion for storytelling and re-shaping how we see the world around us with human-centred design at the forefront. She is interested in the intersection between UX design, creative expression and crafting thoughtful digital experiences that offer different perspectives which would otherwise go unseen.

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