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Story Telling - 11 July 2006
by Rachel Jones
Read this article in Chinese (translated by Binghua Xu, proofread by Christina Li)
Introduction
Story telling has been going on for millennium; it is a wonderful way to entertain and to engage others. Stories are not direct or personal, but they convey a message that can be interpreted by other world views. Various story-telling devices, such as films, novels and plays have become part of a vast entertainment industry that often reflects cultural ideals. Religions often use a book of stories, such as the bible, to convey moral beliefs. So it is perhaps not surprising that HCI has developed forms of narrative to convey stories and messages about people’s lives that it wants other world views to hear.
In this article, I briefly outline three forms of narrative that are commonly practiced in industry: personas, scenarios and ethnography. I outline the characteristics of narrative that have led to its successful take up in HCI. Finally, I put the development of narrative in HCI in the context of broader developments in social theory.
Personas, scenarios and ethnography
The use of abstract representations of people originated in marketing but was heralded by Alan Cooper in his book titled, “The inmates are running the asylum” (1999). Cooper’s early personas were rough sketches of people that were used in the design process to give designers a sense of the people they were designing for. Over time personas have developed into detailed characters that use attributes such as a day in the life, work activities, leisure activities, goals, technology skills, market size, demographics, and quotes. Pruitt and Grudin (2003) extended the use of personas from a design tool to their use by others in the system lifecycle, such as developers, testers, and marketers.
Pruitt and Grudin suggest that personas are “a medium for communication; a conduit for information about users and work settings”.
Caroll and Rosson (1992) introduced scenario-based design in to HCI as a better way to integrate two diverse sets of activities: activities directed at understanding with activities directed at design. Scenarios are seen as a way to facilitate the leap between understanding the user in their setting and designing a system to support them. A scenario description typically contains actors, background information on the actors and assumptions about the environment, actors’ goals or objectives, and sequences of actions or events. Scenario-based design is an approach that employs scenarios as a central representation throughout the system lifecycle. Scenario-based design is part of a wider use of scenarios that have become dominant in corporate strategic planning for envisaging possible future circumstances for an organisation. Scenarios are also used in requirements engineering and object-oriented analysis and design.
Scenarios are concrete, colloquial descriptions at a granularity that people can connect with.
Ethnography is a research method that involves participating in and observing people’s lives and social contexts. It provides an in depth understanding of people; their cultural and symbolic frameworks, their activities and their values. Ethnography is seen primarily as a form of reportage with strategically chosen exemplars that reveal the underlying logics of social practice. Often these underlying and invisible ways of doing something is at odds with, or more complex than, the accepted, top-down view. As a result, ethnography raises broader issues that can challenge preconceived views of systems and their potential effectiveness. It is used in HCI to understand settings before intervention. It is used to inform design and sometimes used to drive innovation. It provides the rich material from which personas and scenarios can be developed. Within HCI, ethnography is associated with the emergence of the field of CSCW and the Participatory Design movement in the 1980s, but it has only become more commonly used in systems design over the past 10 years.
Clifford Geertz famously described culture – the object of anthropological ethnographic inquiry – as “stories that people tell themselves about themselves”.
Characteristics of narrative
To summarise the three forms of narrative I have described above, we could say: a persona describes people’s stories, a scenario describes the activities that people carry out, and ethnography chooses exemplars that offer ways of thinking about settings and the workings of those settings. The common themes between these different narrative forms are they offer concrete descriptions that are open-ended, fragmentary and colloquial, and that people can connect to. The forms are engaging but remain open to interpretation and therefore offer a common language for dialogue between different world views.
Paul Ricoeur argues that we should resist the imperative towards “layers of meaning”, that there is no single truth, but a series of narratives that express the subjectivity of reality. What we commonly call analysis is explicable as a series of emerging narrative constructions on the part of the analyst in the context of rival propositions. It involves a great deal of work in revising and adjusting these narratives in to something mutually agreeable. There is an inevitable resistance to one or other narrative. For Ricoeur, professional expertise involves a trade in narratives.
I would argue that HCI professionals are in the practice of creating narratives about people, their activities, and their everyday settings to encourage a dialogue with the people we work besides – designers, technologists, and marketers. The question is whether we have reached something mutually acceptable to these disciplines? In the narrative forms themselves, I think we have attained some acceptance, though some refinement is still needed. However, in terms of the system lifecycle, I think there are new narrative forms to create about people’s lives. I believe there is still a new story to tell.
References
Carroll, J.M. & Rosson, M.B. (1992). Getting around the task-artifact cycle: How to make claims and design by scenario. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 10, 2, pp 181-212. ACM.
Cooper, A. (1999). The inmates are running the asylum. Macmillan.
Pruitt, J. & Grudin, J. (2003). Personas: practice and theory. Proc. DIS 2003. ACM.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: an essay in interpretation. Yale University Press, NewHaven.
Rachel has over 15 years experience applying a variety of user-centred techniques to new technology design. Rachel founded Instrata in 2001 to bring together a team of multidisciplinary individuals with the common aim of involving people in the design of technology. Rachel has worked at the two foremost pioneers of user-centred techniques in design, Xerox EuroPARC and Sapient (formerly E-lab). Rachel has a PhD is Computer Studies, over 20 international publications and authored 10 patents.
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