Time Activity Duration
9–9:45AM Activity I: Welcome & Community Building 45 minutes
9:45–10:45AM Activity II: Storytelling & Interactivity 60 minutes
10:45–11AM Break 15 minutes
11AM–12PM Activity III: Exploring Emergent & Interpreted Narratives, Part 1 60 minutes
12–1PM Lunch 60 minutes
1–2PM Activity III: Exploring Emergent & Interpreted Narratives, Part 1 Continued 60 minutes
2–2:45PM Activity III: Exploring Emergent & Interpreted Narratives, Part 2 45 minutes
2:45–3PM Break 15 minutes
3–3:45PM Activity III: Exploring Emergent & Interpreted Narratives, Part 2 Continued 45 minutes
3:45–4:30PM Activity IV: Next Steps 45 minutes

Activities will start in small groups of 3–5 participants, which will then reconvene as one large group to compare and combine our findings. We will assist and strongly encourage participants to form interdisciplinary groups to foster a welcoming, productive environment. There are four collaborative activities that build on each other. We will provide activity instructions. With participants’ consent, we will also share activity outcomes (e.g., research notes, design concepts) on this website to share and celebrate our progress towards this workshop’s objectives.

To enable discussions between in-person and online participants, we will host an Microsoft Zoom meeting and invite all participants using the email that they used to submit their bio and research description to the workshop with. At least one member of the organizing committee will manage and moderate the online meeting for the duration of the workshop. During large discussions, an in-person organizer will project the meeting to the room; for small group discussions, we will create breakout rooms. Depending on the number of computers available, the organizers will pair each in-person group with an online breakout room group. We will enable meeting transcriptions to improve our workshop’s accessibility, which we will delete at the workshop’s conclusion. We invite participants with other accessibility needs to contact us before the workshop so that we can investigate available supports.

To allow group members to collaborate and enable sharing with others, we will use Miro for whiteboard-style activities and Google Docs for document-based activities. These digital, collaboration-focused tools will make it easier for groups to exchange work to build and give feedback on.

Activity I: Welcome & Community Building

We will kick-off the workshop with a brief introduction of the organizers, a summary of the workshop’s goals and schedule, and an overview of what IDNs are. In service of our primary goal to foster a welcoming, interdisciplinary space that values its member’s expertise (see Objectives), Activity I focuses on the sharing of participant expertise and their strengths and weaknesses with respect to IDN research and design.

Starting in small groups, each group will build a mind map of their expertise, fields, and connections to IDNs. Participants are encouraged to share the bio and description of their research they submitted to the workshop with their groups to kick-start the discussions. After 15 to 20 minutes, we will reconvene to share insights and findings, and collaboratively explore how our collective expertise bolsters our strengths and mitigates our weaknesses to emphasize our need to work together if we wish to progress.

Activity II: Storytelling & Interactivity

Activity II is for identifying and investigating existing storytelling structures, techniques, and traditions for their ability to support and encourage interactivity (O1). This will build our understanding of interactivity in narratives and serve as a reference when examining the potential of other structures/techniques/traditions to support audience/user-interactions with IDNs.

Small interdisciplinary teams will research at least one storytelling structure, technique, or tradition and collect their findings in a shared note-taking space (e.g., digital whiteboard). Due to the tendency to focus on narratives from our dominant culture, we will encourage groups to investigate one from outside their own culture. We will direct teams respectfully and accurately engage with the topic by understanding the cultural significance of the tradition and conscious, deliberate efforts to find sources by individuals or groups from those cultures. Organizers will also strongly encourage groups to investigate storytelling structures, techniques, and traditions that are not intended for literary forms (e.g., written texts).

Activity III: Exploring Emergent & Interpreted Narratives

To explore the potential for interactivity in storytelling structures/techniques/traditions, we will run a game jam-inspired activity to identify elements and features that we can use to evaluate the interactive potential of other structures/techniques/traditions (O2). Small interdisciplinary teams will design a game concept around a given prompt using their storytelling structure/technique/tradition from Activity II. We will provide prompts (e.g., “Design an interactive system that tells a story through user frustration”, “Tell a story through the way someone touches or holds a device”, “Design a system where the more control the user takes, the less story they see”, “Design a narrative where the interface is the antagonist”), including an invitation to choose a proverb from the culture of their chosen storytelling tradition. We will strongly encourage teams to prioritize emergent narratives (e.g., through interface and interaction) over embedded ones (e.g., exposition) to foreground interactivity by applying knowledge from HCI theory and design.

To manage the scope of this activity, we have divided it into two parts. Part 1 focuses on design using ideation (e.g., bodystorming) and paper prototyping (e.g., Wizard of Oz) methods to rapidly generate, try, and iterate on ideas. In Part 2, we will reconvene as a large group for teams to present their prototypes. In 5–10 minutes, teams will: introduce their chosen prompt and resulting game narrative concept; the underlying narrative form/structure from Activity II; and how they used system properties/behaviours (e.g., affordances, feedback loops) and interactivity (e.g., interaction patterns) to convey a narrative.

Activity IV: Next Steps

Revisiting our insights from Activities I–III, we will identify related avenues of future work and reinforce our need for interdisciplinarity (O3). We will use Activity IV to define our next steps as short and long-term goals.

Organizers will create groups of 3–5 participants for this activity, and each group will build a mind map of their ideas, visions, and goals with respect to the future of IDNs research and design. Every five minutes, the groups will move to another group’s mind map and add their own ideas, counterpoints, and mark the ideas that they endorse. After three or four rotations (15 to 20 minutes), we will reconvene to share our ideas and visions, and collaboratively sketch a plan for next steps as a community. In our closing remarks, we will highlight situations where interdisciplinarity was crucial in workshop activities, and share options for interested participants to continue our collaborations.