1. An area of interest you've identified.
Cybernetics.
2. A couple of questions (stated in the form of a question) and opportunities suggested by your area of interest. What do you (or a potential viewer) want or need to know about this area?
a. How do self-feeding robots navigate and engage their fuel?
b. What are the big questions in autonomous mobile sensor arrays, and how can I address them.
c. How can I use tracking directional-speakers to make a space more engaging.
3. Identify a method or process that can be used to explore your question.
a. Self-feeding robots: Reading and experimentation…and hooking up with someone else who studies this.
b. I’ve already read much on autonomous agents, and I’ve programmed some, but I need to begin studying mobile sensor arrays. Then again, experimentation and hooking-up.
c. Aside from the mechanical and programming issues, I need to study how sound affects not only individuals, but groups of people. And, of course, reading…
4. One to three actual topics or subjects that address your interests/questions. (Not ‘a game’ or ‘experience’ or ‘interactive film,’ find a subject/setting/character/narrative.
a. Using audio to relax, enrapt, or terrify people.
b. Facilitating the management of complex systems (including electro-mechanical and neuropsychological systems.)
c. Managing multiple mobile sensors around a moving target so that if any are disabled, the others will reconfigure their arrangement to maintain maximum coverage of the target.
5. Pair your topics with a genre and an audience: Not just "a game" but the type of game and the type of player you envision. (Expert? General? Student? Adult? Child? Casual? Obsessed? Fan? Animal, Mineral, Vegetable?)
a. A self-feeding mobile sensor array would be fun for quirky adults who want people to stare at them. But, in later evolutions, it could be fun for kids too. It also has mad military applications.
b. The audio might also have law enforcement and military applications. But, as an installation, it could subtly change the tenor of an inhabited space in very exotic ways.
6. Commit to a term (participant, viewer, player, reader, user, audience) that you will use throughout the project. (If you feel this is restrictive, or want more than one term, this is the place to state your view, the important part is to begin to define, and address, your reader.)
Participant, client, target, user, audience. Yup, it’s too restrictive.