1970 · The Door
An Interactive Visual Narrative Across Memory and History
{interaction design, narrative design, historical research, visual development, motion design, sound design, creative coding, front-end development}
Overview
1970 · The Door follows a Chinese literature teacher from her book-filled childhood to her experience of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—a decade of political upheaval, persecution, and enforced ideological conformity from 1966 to 1976. After her family is separated and she is relocated to the countryside for labor and political re-education, an unexpected moment allows her to glimpse a parallel world: Greenwich Village, NYC, in 1970.
I researched the historical context and wrote the narrative, then translated both into a six-chapter interactive experience through visual scene-building, motion, sound, and front-end development.
Historical Research & Position
Drawing on first-person accounts, historical archives, photographs, political prints, and other visual and audio records, the project traces the protagonist’s experience through the Cultural Revolution.
Interactive scenes pair period-specific environments and objects with archival images, cited sources, and contextual information, showing, at a human scale, how political upheaval reshapes home, work, relationships, and private thought.
This project treats history as a warning, not as a visual backdrop. It asks how suppressed or unrecorded experiences can be made visible—and how studying them can help us recognize the return of political violence and enforced conformity.
Multidevice & Multilingual Experience Applications
The six-chapter experience combines first-person narration, digital collage, environmental sound, composited motion, archival objects, and interactive historical annotations. It is currently designed for laptops and tablets, with support for Chinese (Simplified & Traditional) and English. Visitors can control sound, motion, text size, fullscreen viewing, and chapter navigation.
The format could also be adapted for kiosks and tablets in museums and/or archives, as well as on personal computers anywhere. Here, the narrative could sit alongside collection objects and primary materials, giving visitors a self-directed way to move between personal experience, historical context, and archival evidence.
