This session is facilitated by Susan Lechelt, Luis Soares
About this session
In the first part of the session, participants will be asked to write, draw or tell a personal story about their life that might surprise others.
Next, we will do rapid-fire brainstorming and low fidelity prototyping, to ideate what kinds of technologies can be designed to enable open and decentralised story sharing. Ideas can be simple or outlandish, digital or physical. For example, they might include story boxes in a situated in a city, where people can listen to strangers’ stories, or virtual reality applications for experiencing another person’s story from a first-person perspective. To this end, a variety of art and craft materials will be provided to enable the participants to bring their ideas to life. The participants will present and act out their ideas. Finally, we will discuss how future technology can be designed to enable us to relate, rather than to polarise us.
Goals of this session
As social media increasingly polarises and drives us apart, sharing personal stories about our lives can be a great medium of bringing us closer together and helping us relate to others – especially to those who come from different backgrounds and perspectives. The question is, how can we share our personal stories in an open and decentralised way, which subverts the polarised bubbles created by social media?
The goal of this session is therefore to explore how personal stories can bring us together, and how technology can be designed to support the sharing of personal stories. The outcome of the session will be new ideas about how future technologies can support story telling and story sharing among the public.