Janet Murray

Distinguished Professor

Member Of:
  • School of Literature, Media, and Communication
  • ADVANCE IAC
  • Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center
Fax Number:404-894-2833
Office Location: TSRB 320A
Related Links:
Email Address: jmurray@gatech.edu
Faculty Development Mentor

Overview

Personal Pronouns:
she/her

Dr. Janet Murray is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, as well as Director of the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (http://dilac.iac.gatech.edu ) . She received her PhD in English from Harvard. Her primary research interests are interactive design, interactive narrative, and the history and development of representational media. Her widely known book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether we can expect this new medium to support a new expressive art form, comparable to the Shakespearean theater or the Victorian novel in its ability to move and enlighten us. She is mostly optimistic about this possibility. Her textbook, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011) unites the myriad traditional disciplines in which interactive designers are now trained into a single coherent digitally focused design vocabulary. Her Prototyping eNarrative group (PENlab) creates prototypes of emerging narrative structures including interactive television, story-games, and virtual/augmented reality  (http://penlab.gatech.edu ). She is an emerita member of the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute and the Board of the Peabody Awards, an Inaugural Fellow of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance, and a frequent keynote speaker for conferences at the intersection of games and narrative.

Areas of
Expertise:
  • Computational Media
  • Educational Computing
  • Game Design
  • Narrative Studies

Interests

Research Fields:
  • Digital Media
  • Literary and Cultural Studies
  • Media Studies
Issues:
  • Gender
  • Media

Courses

  • LCC-3406: Video Production
  • LCC-4720: Interactive Narrative
  • LCC-6313: Prin-Interactive Design
  • LCC-6317: Interactive Fiction
  • LCC-6650: Project Studio
  • LCC-6800: Master's Project
  • LMC-4720: Interactive Narrative
  • LMC-6313: Prin of Interaction Desi
  • LMC-6317: Interactive Fiction
  • LMC-6650: Project Studio
  • LMC-6800: DM MS Project Course
  • LMC-8801: Special Topics
  • LMC-8813: Adv Issues Interactive
  • LMC-8831: Special Topics Tech Rep

Publications

Books

  • Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as Cultural Practice
    Date: November 2011

    Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field.

    Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits--whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps--as belonging to a single new medium: the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational procedures, userparticipation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity.

    Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorations--creative exercises for students and thought experiments for practitioners--that allow readers to apply the ideas in the chapter to particular design problems. Inventing the Medium also provides more than 200 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts

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  • Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
    Date: 1997

    A consideration of whether interactive narrative could achieve the expressive power of storytelling in older media forms, originally published in 1997, and translated into five languages. An influential work in digital media studies and game studies, it predicts many of the innovations of the past decade, including the recent "transmedia" extensions of TV series across games and web environments.

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Journal Articles