Johanna Koljonen

Participation Design Agency
 https://www.participation.design/

Johanna Koljonen (CEO, Participation Design Agency) is an experience designer and theorist who has been influential in the development of Nordic Larp. She was the lead editor of the 2019 book Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. She lectures internationally on participatory storytelling and the future of the audiovisual industries, advices the culture sector on participation and immersive experiences, and consults for commercial customers in the field. She is a co-founder of the production company Rundfunk Media, which specialised in content for the Swedish public service broadcasters, as well as of the Alibis for Interaction masterclass and the Nordic Larp Talks, currently in its tenth year, which she also hosts.

She is an occasional writer of drama, graphic novels, digital games, and fiction; serves on the board of the Swedish Film Institute; and is a member of the Swedish Comic Book Academy. In 2011, she received the Swedish Grand Journalism Award in the Innovator category. She has a BA in English literature from Oxford University.

Publications

  • Karin Henriksson & Evelina Wahlqvist, (eds): Museerna och besökarna 2050. En framtidsantologi från Riksutställningar. ‘Upplevelsedesign i deltagarsamhället’ (8TTO, 2015 Also available as an e-book single.)
  • ‘Start telling the story of female gamers and developers’ in Maria Edström & Ragnhild Mølster (eds): Making Change. Nordic Examples of Working Towards Gender Equality In The Media (Nordicom, 2014)
  • Främling. En bok om Carola (Weyler, 2012) with Andreas Ekström
  • Three chapters in Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, eds: Nordic Larp, Fëa Livia 2010: “Carolus Rex. The Flagship of Enclosed Space Opera”; “En Stilla Middag Med Familjen. First Person Bourgeois Drama” and (with Tiinaliisa Multamäki) “Dragonbane. Tangible Fantasy, Plausible Magic”. Book available here.
  • ‘The Dragon Was the Least of It: Dragonbane and LARP as Ephemera and Ruin’, Montola & Stenros (eds): Playground Worlds. Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games. Ropecon ry, 2008. Full book pdf right here.
  • ‘Eye-Witness to the Illusion. On the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing’, Donnis, Gade, & Thorup (eds): Lifelike. Knudepunkt 2007, 2007. Download pdf.
  • ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul. Lessons from Hamlet’, Montola & Stenros (eds): Beyond Role and Play. Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination. Ropecon ry 2004. Download pdf.

Social Profiles

All Sessions by Johanna Koljonen

  • 20. Nov | Summit Day

    The Summit Day will feature talks, project presentations, panel discussions, and workshops.

  • 13:45  - 14:45
    Nordic Larp is a decades long game design tradition creating serious immersive experiences, which demand role taking from the participants and offer full narrative agency in return. Played in gallery spaces, historic castles, city streets, and classrooms, exploring storyworlds for art, entertainment, or education, these larps essentially construct virtual realities in analog spaces. To allow participants narrative freedom while telling satisfying and even profound stories, the designers, world builders and writers of this medium have solved many challenges that writers for Transmedia IPs, VR, and other immersive platforms are only now starting to identify. This talk discusses how to approach writing from a perspective beyond character psychology, constructing thematically coherent interaction machines that generate infinite story possibilities, and how achieving this goal is as much a question of paratext as of fiction.
    20. Nov | Film and Games Summit: Crossing Boundaries in Narrative
    Where
    room 104 (ifs)

  • 14:45  - 15:45
    Panel Discussion. Moderation: Joachim Friedmann
    20. Nov | Film and Games Summit: Crossing Boundaries in Narrative
    Where
    room 104 (ifs)

  • 21. Nov | Main Conference Day

    The main day of the Clash of Realities will feature renowned speakers from all around the globe.

  • 15:15  - 16:00
    Participation Design Agency creates high end bespoke roleplaying experiences allowing participants to step into physically realized storyworlds as fully fledged characters. Narrative design for larp centers on two core challenges: how to give participants a sense of total freedom, and how to give them the alibi – the social permission – to participate in activities, try experiences, or engage in playful behaviours that in their daily life they would not. In this talk, Johanna Koljonen will discuss how these challenges are resolved, and the potential of the medium in relation to brand and IP activation, digital games writing and VR. Among the case studies are a three day Hamlet at the actual Castle Elsinore, and a vampire diplomacy game played at the European Parliament with actual MEPs as participants.
    21. Nov | Keynotes on the Main Conference Day
    Where
    Cinema Lecture Hall




Share

Johanna Koljonen