Snowflakes in Scotland: The role of personal reflection in exploring digital poetics and locative stories

Millard, David, Hargood, Charlie, Howard, Yvonne and Hunt, Verity J. (2017) Snowflakes in Scotland: The role of personal reflection in exploring digital poetics and locative stories. MIX 2017: Writing Digital, , Bath, United Kingdom. 10 - 12 Jul 2017.

Abstract

Locative Stories are narratives that are read on a smart device where text is triggered by changes in the reader’s location, resulting in a hypertextual narrative that is navigated by real world movement. Despite the creation of numerous examples over the last decade the poetics of locative stories is poorly understood, and as a result there are limited tools available to writers, restricting the types of work that can be read and range of voices heard.

In the StoryPlaces project we have been working with writers through a process of co-design to develop a range of locative stories and to explore their poetics. We have identified structural patterns, topographical relationships, and writing strategies, and are using these to develop an authoring toolkit and authoring tool.

Co-design is an established method for software designers to engage with domain experts, but is less frequently applied to creative domains. In this presentation we will describe how in the StoryPlaces creative co-design process we have incorporated personal participation and reflection to allow technologists to develop a deeper understanding of the authoring experience. These methodologies are generally overlooked by the Computer Science community, who see them as subjective and unreliable, but they have helped greatly in developing our poetic theory, and in enabling us to empathise and communicate with our writers.

In the presentation we will argue that this approach to co-design is in the spirit of Action Research, and explain how we used the safe space of a Scottish retreat and the Co- operative Inquiry methodology to formalise our observations, and feed them back into our co-design conversation. There is a dearth of design methods for software engineering in the creative arts, and our hope is that this kind of exploratory methodology could help to fill this gap.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: David Millard

Download statistics