A tangible platform for documenting experiences and sharing multimedia stories

Abstract

Stories are a cultural universal that allow us to reflect on the way we live. Through the act of storytelling, we structure and express our personal experiences and understandings of the world in a form that can be passed on to others -- as words, imagery, sounds and gestures. In today's increasingly digital and networked society, we can create media platforms that allow our personal stories to become public and shared. In this paper, we present a tangible platform that has been designed to support the sharing of collaboratively constructed multimedia stories in a social setting. We discuss the way this platform was used in two large-scale personalized storytelling workshops, and examine how it served to engage participants in a self-reflective story revealing process.