Interactive Narratives

& Digital Storytelling

I served as project lead on the Pickrick project, an Augmented Reality experience where the goal was to make history visible in a location-based installation. The "Pickrick" project recreates events over several months in the 1960s, which became the basis of the first lawsuit brought under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Pickrick restaurant was a short-order cafeteria-style restaurant, opened by Lester Maddox in 1947 in Atlanta, just off the Georgia Tech campus, and became the launch pad for Maddox’s political ambitions.  The location has since been absorbed into the Georgia Tech campus and is now called the EcoCommons space, where the AR project occurs.

Pickrick

This project led me to create Black feminist technopractice, an interdisciplinary digital humanities framework for interactive narratives that deploys what we know as participatory design and speculative design, combined with art and archival practices while leveraging Black technoculture, which examines how Black people make meaning in digital spaces. Black feminist technopractice is rooted in the ideology of Black feminist thought (BFT).

  • Black feminist technopractice is a theoretical framework that guides practices and essentially combines Black feminist design (researchers) and Black technoculture (participants) into a technopractice. Instead of creating a project that is supposed to induce empathy, Black feminist technopractices require empathy in the making process.

  • This framework was used in this experience and provided greater context to the events, the participants and institutions they were affiliated with, and out layout of what was happening in the city at the time.

    To see a video of the project, click here.