Why a workshop on stories?

How do design stories work? Exploring narrative forms of knowledge in HCI

Design is storied, and stories are designed. While elements of stories have long been part of the field through methods like personas, scenarios and design fictions, there has been a recent surge of new approaches including fabulations, epics, memoirs, site-writing and design events. In this workshop we aim to understand how stories are built, what narrative traditions they draw from, how they co-constitute research processes and what kind of knowledge can emerge from them. Specifically, we will explore the role of storytelling in HCI, the craft of writing stories, relations between fiction, truth and knowledge and finally the risks, tensions and limitations of writing stories. We will outline an overview of this new wave of stories in HCI and what they are activating and advocating  for, build a set of tips, tricks and advice for writing stories and keep track of ongoing issues and open questions for further research.

In this workshop, we will explore a variety of narratives as forms of knowledge. We invite HCI researchers to submit a story, and to reflect on the following questions:

• What is the relation between fact and fable in a story? What “data” is or can be at the start of stories? For example, (auto)ethnographic observations, design events, other?
• How do we build stories? Character building, perspective taking, temporalities, narrative strategies.
• What form can stories take? What grammar and language do we use for what (verbs/nouns for nonhumans, and the agency it implies, for example)?
• What makes a “good” story? How might we publish and review them? Where does the story go? What would it take to submit a story to CHI? 
• What type of knowledge emerges from design stories?
• Much like design research, there is a craft to writing and making stories. How can the process of writing be translated into findings?
• How do design stories capture elements of embodied or tacit practice that are obscured with other forms of academic reporting? 
• What are the relations and tensions between stories, fiction, truth, memory, and knowledge?
• How might different knowledge be embodied and performed through stories?