Senior BFA Thesis 2023

Interview with Patrick Smith

At the start of our zoom call, I first learned that Patrick started his career path by sharing his weird experimentation with the internet world. His first games (which included my favorite, Feed the Head), were purely experimental, for which he thought “why not just put them on the internet?” For Patrick, the 2000s internet was a very ambiguous place where people would just click on random links. So he shared the link of his game with people, and they shared it with others, and then Patrick noticed a lot of people found interest in his portfolio of interactive, dialogue-lacking games. So he released a lot of his other projects, and then soon turned them into IOS/Android apps. From this, I was able to connect with how he develops narrative without words in animation.

I asked him the following questions:

What is your creative process?

Why Vectorpark? (Why do you make art?)

How do you go about storytelling with design?

To my first question, Patrick described how he enjoyed the silence of comics, specifically silent narrative comics. I immediately thought of Gary Larson's The Far Side comics, which use only illustrations (and rarely background text) to describe the scene. Patrick described that he enjoyed how silent narratives allow viewers to wander and explore the “space” (in this case, explore the space of the page). Stories can be stitched together by visual descriptors that give components context between one another. He sees this as an organic process, where you don't sit down to write a story—the illustration writes it for you.

As for his work on the game Feed the Head, Patrick's vision for it was this silent thing (the giant head) that would suffer through the user's decisions and interactions. As hilarious as it sounds, it is actually a pretty remarkable method of storytelling and encouraging user interaction. The helplessness of the giant head gives the user guidance without force feeding any predetermined steps to them. There is no dialogue, only motion, color, and reaction.

To my second question, Patrick explained that he named his portfolio Vectorpark because he liked the idea of a “park”. A park suggests exploration and some degree of play. By calling his portfolio a park, Patrick gave it something to aspire to, a venue for coherency amongst his different animation projects. I saw then that he really knew how to think like a designer (beyond his obvious design skills). Even his portfolio had appropriate context. Patrick showed me that he makes the art he makes because he enjoys experimenting with human interaction, just as I do with User Experience design. Since the web is a place to contextualize without expectation (this moreso applied to the web in the 90s), he was able to test out having people trust the process of the silent stories in his web games.

To my third question, Patrick was responding while also learning about how far I had gotten into the experimentation process of my thesis. The most useful feedback I received from him was that storytelling through animation was about rewarding the user with breadcrumbs. You want to show the user that little interactions within the entire experience may unlock or trigger more possibilities, so you give them a very small reward, which can be something like a hint to what they should click next (without dialogue of course). For example, in Feed the Head, when you hover the cursor over the head's ear, a small hand waves out, silently indicating“click me”.

For my thesis, Patrick observed that this user experience would be an interactive experience through the context of nature, which became personal since I wanted to use the metaphor of a garden. He advised that I should animate the users progress with my existing plant animations, perhaps by rewarding the user's progress by animating plant growth with how far they get implementing a task throughout the week. After he saw my stamp ideas, Patrick even suggested that I reward the user with stamps for completing certain amounts of tasks. This could be an interesting way to implement the idea of personal achievements for the user, giving them incentive to keep coming back into my app and using it.

Overall, Patrick was very encouraging and enjoyed hearing about my process coming up with this thesis idea. I learned a lot about the perspective of a designer from him, which helped me further refine major assets of this project, one being my actual thesis statement itself. Who am I designing for? Why should the user care about coming back to the app? Why should the user care about using the app in the first place? It was there where I determined that I was ready to go full steam ahead in the app design process.