Contacts: Tarun Durga, Central St Martins, Centre for Creative Collaboration
www.mappingtales.com
Mentor: Mark Wing, www.interrelated.co.uk
Tarun is a former creative director for a new media agency, who is now working on a Masters in Design Studies at Central St Martins, and is part of the MADS Collective at the Centre for Creative Collaboration. He has written screenplays and stories for the Indian film industry, and has previously collaborated on a graphic novel project for the HopeConnectsKids Foundation in the US.
Tarun is identifying modern-day “urban tribes”, groups of people who are passionate about a certain activity, and who form themselves into a community of enthusiasts. Examples include jugglers, graffiti artists, buskers, motorcyclists and many more. He works with these tribes in interactive story-telling workshops, and helps them to create their own tale reflecting their fundamental motivators and group identity. His aim is to express these stories in a graphical format, by collaborating with prominent cartoon and comic strip artists, and then to distribute the tales online and in other ways.
Urban tribes are complex, in that one person may be a member of several tribes to differing degrees. Tarun is especially interested in those groups of people whose urban tribe becomes the major part of their life. He plans to extend the concept globally, since people’s fundamental motivators are the same worldwide, although how these are expressed into tribes will strongly depend on the local culture and society.
The challenge for the i-Team is to help Tarun take his Tales forward, by identifying and contacting additional urban tribes, helping Tarun to encourage artists to collaborate with him on developing the stories, and working with him to recommend the appropriate distribution strategy for the Tales.