UX Week 2007 | Stone Soup: Stories and Storytelling for Collaboration

What this episode covers

We listen to stories for enlightenment and tell stories for education and entertainment. Everyday people are convinced, impressed, enlightened, discouraged, encouraged and swayed by the stories others tell in the workplace. In business time may be money, but the power of a good story, well told at the right time, has changed the course of individual careers, corporations and entire industries. But the process of creating a story can also be enlightening and entertaining in its own right, and it can be a useful tool for helping groups of individuals collaborate to express a unified idea or set of goals. As “storytelling animals,” we all have the ability to create narrative, particularly about topics close to us. We are also capable of understanding stories, especially when we find a way to relate them to personal experience. Sometimes collaboration or team building involves everyone contributing relevant ideas, sometimes it takes asking the right questions. But collaboration always requires listening hard enough to know which to do when, and group story-creation techniques can greatly help this process. In this session, you will: * Review and practice the three critical elements necessary for nurturing the creativity and collaboration inherent in storytelling: listening, structuring and telling. * Practice telling a simple story both on your own and collaboratively, with the goal of learning how to communicate effectively. * Discover how story structures and other patterns can be used to guide creative endeavors. * Acquire the tools you need to bring collaborative storytelling techniques into your own organization. About Kevin Brooks Kevin is a principle staff researcher for Motorola Labs and a professional oral storyteller. At Motorola, Kevin researches new user-interface technologies and expresses these technologies as connected user-centered experiences, creating “technology stories” that incorporate elements of audio, video, graphics, written language and computer programming. As a writer and performing oral storyteller, Kevin tells personal tales from his urban childhood in the 60s to his present-day role as a parent himself, and he has been a featured performer at many storytelling festivals, conferences and other venues. Kevin received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where his area of research was computational narrative and interactive cinema. He has also studied engineering, computer science, creative writing and film production as an undergraduate, receiving a BS in Communications from Drexel University and an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University. Kevin has several published papers and has given numerous workshops on storytelling and interactive story design. In 2006 he released his first CD of stories, entitled Kiss of Summer.

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