Transmedia phenomena: new practices in participatory and experiential content production

Nowadays we live in a society rich of a growing number of messages spread by multichannel and multimodal devices. A scenario that outlines the need of a designer able to manage the coexistence of multiple factors using his tools to overcome the problems of understanding information and access them. Starting from the complex nature of communication flows, we can define a main objective: to encourage a dialogue among people. For this reason, it is important to study the evolution of the existing communication systems, in order to understand the new collaborating and participative processes, and how media and languages have broken their historical isolation and incompatibility. Thanks to a large amount of theoretical assumptions, and according with thoughts and projects developed during these years, the aim of this work is to figure out a new form of literacy that allows us to develop content able to foster a rich user experience through the merge of different languages, media, technologies, and to rethink the participatory process. First of all, the work will highlight the developments in the communication field that are affecting society, exploring three main areas: audience, technology and user engagement. After this the paper will focus on The Spiral, a pan-European Transmedia coproduction, as an example of potential activities in order to do reflections on what are challenges and opportunities of the Transmedia Phenomenon within the broadcast production.