Inverting the ‘black box’ of technology: the Digital Ghost Hunt

This article provides an account of the author’s own creative project, The Digital Ghost Hunt, a 2017-2019 collaboration between the University of Sussex, King’s Digital Lab and KIT Theatre. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Centre in the 2018 ‘Immersive Experience’ funding stream and was awarded a full grant for the pilot and an extension to build and widen audiences in the second phase in 2019. Throughout this article we explore the role of an immersive experience in deepening social and historical engagement with the physical world in contrast to the ‘black box’ design paradigm. This work allows for the comparison of the engagement of participants invited to engage with technology-aided experience as builder-makers and as naïve audiences to an already designed experience. We also consider the interactions between design and technology as a means of bringing people of different ages and attitudes towards technology together through shared learning and problem-solving, also with a nod to the popularity of escape room experiences.