On tour – Wales (Digital Storytelling)
This past week, I was at the University of Swansea in South Wales. Specifically, I was visiting Matt Jones (long time collaborator with whom I wrote our Mobile Interaction Design book), Harold Thimbleby (former PhD supervisor) and George Buchanan (research collaborator) who make up the teaching staff of the FIT lab (Future Interaction Technologies).
Work-wise the highlight of the week was a workshop in digital story telling. Besides Harold, Matt and myself, there were presentations from Daniel Meadows who has worked on digital story telling for the BBC in the ‘Capture Wales’ project, and Prue Thimbleby who is using digital story telling as a way of reaching disenfranchised people on the poorer estates in Swansea. Actually, it was Prue’s story that shocked me the most. She told us how 98% of the people on one of the estates had absolutely no qualifications. That is worse than Cape Town! Once again we see that the digital divide is certainly not a geographic phenomenon. What was encouraging about Prue’s talk was how the reflection engendered in creating the story could result in improvements in the story teller’s life. For example, one of her story tellers created a story about his Saturday night drinking habits - by the time the story was complete, he had given up drinking as he realised the harm that it brought to his life.
Daniel spoke about the form and history of digital story telling. In case you don’t know, the form of the stories is a series of still shots with an audio story overlaid. It may sound like a boring asynchronous form of a PowerPoint show, but the two elements combine to form something that is more than the sum of its parts. Check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/. Very cool.
What I am thinking of is the experiences I had with the Zambians who had the images on their phones to help tell the stories of their lives. Wouldn’t it be great if we could create some software to help them package up their stories this way and share them with the rest of the world?
By the way, the photo is looking back at Swansea from a place called Mumbles (yes, really). The biggest blob is the university.
Monday, 13 November 2006