Scott Walker

Scott Walker likes playing in the collaborative sandbox of commercial entertainment and co-creating value with audiences. He primarily achieves this as President of Brain Candy, LLC (http://braincandyllc.com), where he crafts participatory experiences that bridge audiences and creatives.

To better explore the relationship between participatory entertainment and transmedia storytelling, Scott co-founded Transmedia Los Angeles (http://www.meetup.com/Transmedia-Los-Angeles/) and launched Shared Story Worlds (http://sharedstoryworlds), a site devoted to collaborative entertainment properties with participatory elements.

Scott has been a panelist at Digital Book World 2011, a featured guest on the Transmedia Talk podcast, and a guest speaker at Disney’s Imagineering R&D. He’s also on the Advisory Council for the upcoming StoryWorld Conference.”

What Scott will be doing at DIY DAYS

Building a Shared Story World

Audiences are increasingly unwilling to passively consume content pushed at them, and experience designers can benefit from using the concept of value co-creation (i.e., audiences are perfectly capable and willing to contribute content to your property or brand). One implementation of value co-creation is the “shared story world” model which explicitly invites audiences to contribute directly to the world. The result is collaborative world building using a framework of guided invitations coupled with a strong, internally-driven narrative.

This isn’t choose-your-own-adventure, transmedia storytelling, exquisite corpse or crowd-sourced content production.

It is about recognizing the value audiences can offer, building bridges to them, and inviting them to participate.

This workshop will generate the foundation for a specific new shared story world by stepping through the core design considerations – we will literally design a new shared story world together. Some of the topics we’ll discuss are: legal considerations, narrative design, commercial rights, and remix policy.”

DIY DAYS asks Scott

What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?

I’m thrilled about my latest just-for-fun project, Star Wars Remix (http://starwarsremix.blogspot.com), a site for Star Wars fans to remix their ordinary world in to something from the Star Wars universe. I love how this project combines Star Wars, fandom, and DIY/crafting. It sprang from conversations I had with Emma Beddows (http://www.emmabeddows.com/) about fandom and our shared love of Star Wars. Once we had the general idea in hand, we asked designer Noah Scalin (http://noahscalin.com/) and Mica Scalin (http://publicaddress.typepad.com/micawavetv) for some help with initial remixes and getting the word out.

But I’m really excited about a new (still untitled) entertainment IP set in medieval Japan that’s a personal project of mine. It’s primarily a fantasy series loosely using historical Japan as a backdrop. I’m working on a design that allows audiences to explore the world in more ways than just the textual fiction. The best part is that it combines many areas of interest for me: the fantasy genre, Japan, Zen and Shintoism, participatory storytelling, and collaborative world-building. Plus, I’ll finally be able to use both my English degree and my Religious Studies degree at the *same* time!

What are some of your favorite sites and / or mobile apps and brief why?

I use Twitter as my RSS feed in way that delivers diverse but highly relevant content to me, so I’m hitting whatever sites get served up by the collective intelligence of the twitterverse. I’ll also spin over to sites like boingboing.net, io9.com, or deviantart.com when I want some interesting reads or creative inspiration.

I only have a handful of apps on my phone/iPad, but two I absolutely can’t live without are the Kindle and Dropbox Apps. Productivity. Backup. Convenience.

What’s are you currently watching, reading or playing?

If you exclude the Disney/Dreamworks movie-cade and non-stop Lego building my three kids subject me to (which isn’t as bad as it sounds!), then I’d say my remaining time is spent on books, movies, and online research for my upcoming project (e.g., reading William E. Deal’s “Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan,” queued up “The Samurai Trilogy” films for later this week and I’m hopscotching across half a dozen books on Zen and Shinto). I’m not as much of a video or role-playing gamer as I used to be, but recently I’ve been going through some older titles I missed earlier like “Bioshock” and “HALO: ODST,” and I’m looking forward to “Into the Far West.” (http://intothefarwest.com) And I’m impatiently waiting for season three of “Archer.” Very impatiently.

For more on Scott and his work visit

Site:http://metascott.com