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Design

The Infinite Adventure Machine Deciphers The Human Imagination

A British designer uses artificial intelligence to supplement the imagination.

Publishers have been struggling to adapt to the digital medium ever since it became clear that blogs were more than just a fad. They’ve experimented with iPad apps and QR codes and Tumblrs, all with varying success, but fundamentally, most of these projects tended to miss the point, simply redressing print media content for the digital platform and rarely taking advantage of the inherent properties of digital media, such as its networkability, its asynchronicity, its interactivity. But the problem with applying those shiny new formats to the publishing realm is this: they tend to uproot narrative structure, the very foundation of publishing.

But British designer David Benqué may have found a way to circumvent that problem by outsourcing narrative and plot line to the human imagination. His Infinite Adventure Machine application is a software programmed to generate whimsical fairy tale scenarii in an attempt to bring artificial intelligence and human imagination together to pen the greatest story ever told. How’s that for user engagement?

His logic and story components are based upon the work of Vladimir Propp, a Russian folk scholar who managed to slim down his nation’s folk corpus to 31 basic structures. Similarly, Benqué’s iPad app builds incomplete narratives, filled with holes, specifically designed for the human imagination to polish, augment and personalize. Effectively, it turns the act of writing into a human-machine interactive collaboration.

In the video above, Benqué and his daughter give a quick demo of the app while sitting in a living room reminiscent of his passion for design. The project will be showcased at the Cité de la Mode et du Design in Paris, as part of a specific program called GLITCHFICTION for Paris Design Week.