Content uploaded by Berke Atasoy
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Berke Atasoy on Jul 18, 2017
Content may be subject to copyright.
Crafting user experiences by incorporating dramaturgical techniques of storytelling
Abstract
Design is changing into an experience-oriented discipline and therefore designers need appropriate tools and methods to incorporate experiential aspects into their designs. We argue that the creative skills required of designers are starting to overlap with those required of professional storytellers. Understanding the structural strategies behind storytelling and learning how to incorporate them into a design process is becoming increasingly relevant for designers when they want to envision, discuss and influence user experiences. We have specifically investigated dramaturgical techniques from film and sequential art (also known as comics) in order to establish how they can inspire existing conceptual design methods such as brainstorming, scenarios, personas and storyboarding. The specific tool entitled "Storify" that we present at the end of this paper is a concrete proposal for how to support designers in their creative efforts when crafting and communicating stories about envisioned experiences.
... Why and how can it be useful? Methods and tools used in storytelling are believed to be relevant when planning for human experiences [7], [13], [27], [10], as was argued in more detail in "Crafting user experiences by incorporating dramaturgical techniques of storytelling" [2]. Professional storycrafting processes are quite advanced in their explicit awareness and clearly defined strategies to aim at influencing experiences deliberately. ...
... Design is a creative endeavor, and designers are explorers of inspiration: Insplorers. Insploration works as a conscious and systematic act of searching for and capturing stimulants that may inspire new ideas[Atasoy, and Martens 2011]. ...
The design profession is shifting from designing objects towards designing for experiences, and the main premise of this paper is that designers need strategic guidance in bringing the emotional, contextual, and temporal aspects of experiences into discussion. Existing externalization strategies are not obviously equipped to help incorporate the transient characteristics of experiences into the designer’s creative thinking. In this paper, we propose that designers may be able to achieve this by including visual storycraft into their creative process. Storycraft is the skilled practice of generating/building stories. Stories and experiences share a sequential structure with a beginning, middle, and end that can be crafted and influenced through design to evoke and affect the emotions of their experientors. Several activities of designers are already very similar to those of professionals in storycraft, as the tools and techniques used in both domains are aimed at creating emotionally satisfying experiences. While harnessing the power of storycraft to elevate strategies in designing for experiences is an attractive idea, which has been embraced earlier by the design research community, it is not a proposal that can easily be put into practice. We have iteratively designed, evaluated, and improved Storyply as a method that combines ‘conceptual design’ and ‘story planning’. Our studies have confirmed that incorporating storycraft within conceptual design by means of Storyply resonated well with design teams and indeed helped them to discuss and frame ideas in an experience-centric fashion.
... In the field of industrial design, several studies explored storytelling tools to support industrial designers and industrial design students. Atasoy and Martens [4,5] argued that the creative skills required of designers overlapped with those of professional storytellers. Peng [30,31] explored storytelling in design by creating a toolkit called 'Pitchify' to help industrial design students craft and visualize stories to envision the user experience. ...
Drawing on our collective experience as educators and preliminary results of an in-progress research study, we explore the complexities of integrating storytelling into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Within the user experience (UX) industry, storytelling is considered essential for collaborating, engaging stakeholders, and shaping professional identities. However, despite that importance, effectively teaching storytelling presents an unsolved educational challenge in HCI. We begin by examining storytelling’s multifaceted and elastic nature in UX practice and how that contributes to the challenge of teaching it, demonstrating key points with quotes and anecdotes from our ongoing research. We then discuss various pedagogical approaches to help students understand good storytelling, practice their storytelling skills, and better appreciate how storytelling can shape their academic and professional success. We hope that by sharing what we are grappling with as we investigate UX storytelling in practice, we can engage the EduCHI community in productive discussions to help us move our collective teaching practices forward.
... This role-playing technique was influenced by the collaborative theatrical dramaturgy of Boal, Zaporah, and Johnstone, as well as improvisational musician Nachmanovich (Boal 1992;Namanovich 1990;Shyba 2008;Iaccucci and Kuutti 2002). Designers often enact scenarios to create ideas and concepts for an imaginary future, using simple prototypes of their own creation (Atasoy and Martens 2011;Bødker 2000;Carroll 2000;Iacucci and Kuutti 2002). Scenarios also help designers communicate ideas to one another because they provide context, define a problem space, and allow for consideration of multiple perspectives (Bødker 2000;Caroll 2000a;Jonas 2001;Pedell & Vetere 2005). ...
... Conceptual design is a series of activities that outline and draft the key characteristics of an experience (Atasoy & Martens, 2011;Hanington & Martin, 2012). An essential part of the early design process is to initiate creative reflection and plan subsequent phases (Kim & Ryu, 2014). ...
As a particular type of artificial intelligence technology, machine learning (ML) is widely used to empower user experience (UX). However, designers, especially the novice designers, struggle to integrate ML into familiar design activities because of its ever-changing and growable nature. This paper proposes a design method called Material Lifecycle Thinking (MLT) that considers ML as a design material with its own lifecycle. MLT encourages designers to regard ML, users, and scenarios as three co-creators who cooperate in creating ML-empowered UX. We have developed ML Lifecycle Canvas (Canvas), a conceptual design tool that incorporates visual representations of the co-creators and ML lifecycle. Canvas guides designers to organize essential information for the application of MLT. By involving design students in the “research through design” process, the development of Canvas was iterated through its application to design projects. MLT and Canvas have been evaluated in design workshops, with completed proposals and evaluation results demonstrating that our work is a solid step forward in bridging the gap between UX and ML.
Using Research through Design, this paper explores how to design a technology augmented outdoor playground installation that utilizes storytelling to create engagement for local wildlife and ecosystems. Through a multisectorial design project a permanent playground installation was developed, implemented, tested and evaluated over a period of six years. The installation is a small play hut, integrated in the natural landscape and augmented with interactive audio stories. The installation was found to invite extended and recurring use, for children and families. The stories and their content seemed to engage children, and they also readapted them through story-informed play. Creating meaningful interactivity proved challenging, as it caused confusion and broke storytelling immersion. We suggest the strong concepts of designing for Story-Informed Play and the Unique Opportunity Effect. Other design implications include to design for; qualitative story content, robustness, playification, screen-free interaction, ambiguity, malleability, intuitive use, multi-user, and extending the experience beyond the installation.
It has been broadly proved that storytelling, which is regarded as a natural creative human activity, serves as an effective thinking tool for improving creativity in service design. In practice, however, the lack of support for storytelling affects the perceived usefulness and ease of storytelling for novice designers. This results in a low willingness to use storytelling, poor usage, and low design innovation among novice designers. Research has identified significant differences between experts and novices in the design process, and summarizing these differences in thinking strategies can effectively guide novices in design activities. In previous research, we have successfully used the six thinking hats for novices to learn expert strategies and enhance their creativity. The purpose of this study is to compare differences between experts and novices in storytelling strategies and design behaviors in process, in order to understand how to support novices in storytelling and enhance creativity. The study uses verbal protocol analysis to explore the differences between three teams of novices and three teams of experts. We use the De Bono's "six thinking hats" thinking tool to decode designers' implicit and latent design thinking and use Burke's "dramatistic pentad" theory to extract the design teams' storytelling thinking. The results show significant differences between experts and novices in storytelling strategy and construction process, where experts tend to have more efficient storytelling strategies and design behaviors than novices. The expert strategies we found can guide design educators to support students when solving service design problems and provide important theoretical support and methodological guidance for instructing novices in expert storytelling strategies.
Collaborative design is the use of design practices which tend to favor the integration of different experts, and to support creativity and innovation. Therefore, in this study, we were particularly interested in the collaborative design tools used in the specific context of a pedagogical hackathon. During this event, 1310 engineering students mentored by professors and industrial experts worked on around 131 industrial projects. In this article, we will present our study of the tools put in place by the participants of these innovative projects according to their training. Our study is based on a collection of project data. We will show that storyboards are often used in projects that tend toward radical innovation. Moreover, these tools are used by groups who have not received specific training on using storyboards.
The usage of instructional media (apps) is poorly delivered due to inappropriate content of the presentation. Recent studies showed that perceptions among students and teachers regarding the use of apps are very low. Thus, Digital Storytelling (DST) concept is infused in developing the apps. Nevertheless, students are unable to comprehend DST clearly. The aim of this study is to identify DST elements for the development tablet based teaching products (apps). Critical analysis and comparative analysis are employed based on eight samples of DST tools to formulate generic DST elements. Eleven DST elements are formed and learning theories are adapted based on correct principles and procedures. The elements should contribute a new pedagogical approach for teachers in developing apps with mobile technology.
This paper presents early quantitative results from an exploratory study in which partici- pants aged 7-11 wrote stories using a paper-and-card interface based on Propp's morphology. The study is part of an investigation of the use of Propp's morphology as a story writing tool for children, with the aim of formalising the tool for implementation. The general research questions are: can children apply this tool to story writing? how successfully do they use it? and what do they do with it? The study illustrates an experimental methodology which can now be developed based on our experience, for answering these questions. The quantitative results show that children were able to apply the tool to story writing with a high degree of accuracy. The results must now be used to identify data for further qualitative analysis, to learn about how the children use the tool and what they do with it.
We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.
Francis Glebas, a top Disney storyboard artist, shows how to reach the ultimate goal of animation and moviemaking by showing how to provide audiences with an emotionally satisfying experience. Directing the Story offers a structural approach to clearly and dramatically presenting visual stories. With Francis' help you'll discover the professional storytelling techniques which have swept away generations of movie goers and kept them coming back for more. You'll also learn to spot potential problems before they cost you time or money and offers creative solutions to solve them. Best of all, it practices what it preaches, using a graphic novel format to demonstrate the professional visual storytelling techniques you need to know. © 2009, Francis Glebas. Published by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.
To find out how designers collect and use visual material, this PhD research project combined working prototypes, theories
and methods from different disciplines and contextual observations in a ‘research through design’ approach.
Initially working prototypes were used to infer knowledge from theory and practice; at the end the working prototypes were
used to explore and gain knowledge about theory and practice.
Cabinet, the final prototype from this research, demonstrates how designers can be supported; it was placed in the designer
environment to find its effect on collecting behaviour.
Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 42-71
Indian philosophy has often been described as radically different in nature than Western philosophy due to its frequent use of narrative structure. By employing poetic elements in their use of language, such texts attempt to convey deep metaphysical truths and philosophical positions about reality that are in many cases quite different from Western ideas (Babbili 1997). Often, these ways of conveying truths are an integral part of that truth. One particularly useful form is narrative, taking instantiations such as a dialogue between characters. Philosophical dialogues such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Astavakra Gita (also known as the Astavakra Samhita ) use a portrayed conversation involving a guru or deity to convey didactic lessons and values to the receptive audience, both ancient and modern. As texts such as the Bhagavad Gita gain in popularity and circulation in the Western world (Minor 1982; Paine 1998; Sharpe 1985), philosophical and rhetorical inquiry must be extended to explain how these texts function in an argumentative philosophical context.
Stroud (2002a, 2002b) has advanced the idea that such ancient Indian narratives argue through the use of contradictions and conflicting value structures; he labels such texts as multivalent narratives since their use of contradictory value structures compel audience members to reconstruct the narrative's message and allow for the acceptance of novel views. Multivalent narratives are to be distinguished from polysemic narratives (Fiske 1986) in that the latter concern different audience members finding a preferred position from the ambiguous story. Polysemic narratives involve the difference in meaning of the same story to different auditors. Condit criticizes this notion of polysemic narratives and advances her own concept of polyvalent narratives. The concept of a polyvalent narrative involves different auditors understanding the same story in similar ways, but differing in how they evaluate its message. Condit's research with a popular television show and two students from radically different backgrounds on abortion finds that they understood what occurred in a very similar fashion; they differed in that they "disagree[d] about the valuation of those denotations to such a degree that they produce[d] noticeably different interpretations" (1989, 106). Thus, the auditors differ as to their response to a certain story and how it treats their own cherished values. Stroud (2002a) provides a thorough justification as to why the concepts of polysemic and polyvalent narratives do not capture what can be called multivalent narratives. The important factor in distinguishing these three concepts is that the third involves contradictions at the level of values within a text and the reader's necessitated activity of trying to synthesize or reconcile such contradictions. It is this activity that is the hallmark of multivalent narratives.
This employment of multivalent narrative offers a challenge to familiar Western conceptions of argumentative discourse and demands further investigation. This study explores the ways a particular text, the Astavakra Gita , argues its philosophical positions to its audience of potential "pupils." Using the insights provided by theories of narrative and reader-response theory, I will argue that this text advances its claims not through overt syllogism or validity claim redemption, but through textual indeterminacy between the audience's disposition and the foregrounded theme of non-individuation in the text. This tension, increased by certain textual devices, results in consistency building by the audience, which enables the transcendence of these two viewpoints (reader and text); it is this experience, not claim , that the Astavakra Gita seems to be advancing to any given audience.
In order to explore this interpretation of this text and its argumentative relationship to an audience, insights from both literary studies and rhetorical theory must be used in laying a foundation. The work of Wolfgang Iser (1980, 1989, 1993) and Walter Fisher (1987) will assume roles of particular importance in this endeavor. Iser's theory of aesthetic response provides a useful description of the phenomenological process of reading such a text, whereas Fisher's theory of narrative can provide insight into the conditions and machinations of audience acceptance of a particular narrative as holding good reason for action and/or belief. These theoretical insights will...