Storytelling for Development

Right now I'm almost halfway through a six-month project called Storytelling for Development, which is piloting digital storytelling as an approach for increasing community engagement in urban redevelopment processes, and for creating a two-way exchange between communities and the architects, planners, and councils who do the redevelopment.

What's particularly exciting in terms of performance is the strand of work that uses digital storytelling - essentially the making of little 'mini-movies' out of still images and voiceover narration - in a community workshop, where people who have made digital stories screen their work for each other and use them as a springboard for discussion. This will take their stories out of the virtual mustiness of the digital archive and into relationship with each other. I can't wait to see if the participants respond solely in conversation or if they feel inspired to make new digital stories as well.

I'm also keen to see what happens in the final stage of the project, where employees from our partners at Farrells architect planners create digital stories in response to all the community stories that get created. I'm hoping that some of the holistic and humane point of view that comes through in these stories will give the architects a new angle on the redevelopment process, and might even inspire new design ideas. Of course, it might not. It might be a pain in the rear and a complete dead end. Even the community workshops might lead nowhere. But you never know until you try...

catching up

I had lunch overlooking the River Wey yesterday with the ever-fabulous Robyn Taylor, who does some amazing work on designing from within - bringing performance into the design space and even the designed artefact. Her work on the humanaquarium project has been a great focal point for Peformative Experience Design, and it features in John McCarthy and Peter Wright's new book, Taking [A]part: The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation in Experience-Centered Design. If you're remotely interested in this area and haven't run across Robyn's work before, you should definitely take a look.

Interactive and live performance design with children

PED has been taken up with a fantastic twist by researchers at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Their paper is titled Interactive and live performance design with children, and it's well worth a look.

Digital Creativity paper

Michael Nitsche edited a really exciting special issue of Digital Creativity (24:2) that explored the emergence of a truly substantive, productive mix of performance art and digital media.

Our contribution to that special issue is titled 'Performative Experience Design: Where autobiographical performance and human-computer interaction meet'. It was written about halfway through the project it is based on, but it's pointing in the right direction.

You can find it on my academia.edu page for that paper, free for the first however many downloaders, by clicking the 'tandfonline.com' link towards the top of the page.

I'd say the whole issue is worth a good look, though.

teaser for HCI folks

The background for Performative Experience Design in an HCI context was set out in this alt.chi paper. In it we basically take to task every poor soul working in HCI or interaction design who has ever tried to use performance as an input or structure for their design work, and very few emerge unscathed. This isn't necessarily because we think this work was done badly - but we do think it could have gone much, much further.

So if you'd like to read a paper that could have been subtitled 'Why Most People Get Performance and Performativity Totally Wrong' - written by, I promise, the sweetest three people you're likely to meet in a given day in academia - have a look.

But don't forget, this is a very short paper addressing PED in a very lopsided way - only talking about how HCI people have used performance in the past. PED sits in the space equidistant from both HCI/interaction design and performance studies. I'll blog more about the performance side of things soon.

what's this all about?

We don't 'consume' technology. We experience it. McCarthy and Wright had that insight over a decade ago, and they're not alone.

But when it comes to digital media technology - photos, videos, songs, social networks - we don't just experience. We perform.

With every snapshot we share and every line of text we post, we become a little bit more of who we are, or who we are trying to appear to be.

'Performance' has nasty connotations of falseness or manipulation. This might be the case sometimes, or in some small way most of the time. But what would the opposite be? Authenticity? Is there really a snapshot or a tweet that captures the essence of a human being? That might be the case sometimes, or in some small way most of the time...

Performative Experience Design (PED) is the design-oriented study of ways of interacting with digital media technology that focuses on the experience of that interaction among the person, her digital media, and the other people who become aware of that interaction. PED doesn't look at the technology itself, or even at the interaction between the technology and its 'user', but at the ways the 'user' experiences herself in relation to her digital media and the people with whom she shares that experience. And that relationship is a performative one.

'Performing' doesn't necessarily mean jazz-hands-and-bright-lights theatrical performance. The words 'performance' and 'performativity' also conjure up J.L. Austin's performative utterances, Judith Butler's discourse that trumps even biology and leaves precious little room for resistance, Victor Turner's study of ritual performance, Erving Goffman's theatrical metaphor of the presentation of self, Richard Schechner's wonderfully pithy 'showing doing', Jill Dolan's utopian performatives, research on embodiment, research on situated interactions, research on audiences and spectatorship - and this is just off the top of my head. In fact, a large part of the project of PED is to unpack exactly what we mean by 'performative' and where those different definitions might lead us.

When I put a picture on Instagram, I'm doing a performative interaction. When I show you my holiday photos on my phone over lunch, I'm doing a performative interaction. When I take to the stage and project a video about myself, I'm doing a performative interaction. When I use my digital photos and social networks as inspiration for a performance that has no digital elements at all, I'm doing a performative interaction.

These things matter. A billion Facebook users and counting. Careers made on YouTube. Lives threatened on Twitter. Lives ruined over Snapchat. The important thing isn't just the technology, or the interface, or in a way even the content. The important thing is how we use this technology to experience our lives and perform those experiences, for ourselves and for each other.

That's something worth studying. Worth designing for. Worth playing with.