CSCW workshop position paper on narrative methods

1. Using Story Templates as a Method to Cumulate Knowledge in
HCI and International Development
John Thomas
IBM Research
PO Box 704
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 USA
jcthomas@us.ibm.com
www.truthtable.com
Effective design work is always a challenge but this challenge is multiplied when
someone attempts to design systems that will be used in an entirely different context from
the design team’s own context. One design situation that is particularly challenging in
this regard is to design systems for the so-called developing world. Designers in the so-
called developing world, for a number of reasons ranging from altruism to greed, are
evidencing increasing interest in doing just that, particularly for systems that require
human-computer interaction. The usual wisdom is that good HCI design relies on
knowledge of the users, as well as their tasks, contexts, and goals. People in the so-called
developing world may live in very different physical contexts from the design team; for
instance, users may live in situations of extreme heat, cold, or humidity. Further, they
may live in a social and political context that is unfamiliar to the designers. The
designer’s assumptions about infrastructure may also be mistaken; e.g., it may be quite
difficult to acquire a battery or a screwdriver. Adoption of new technology may depend
on acceptance by elders, local government, or other authorities and have little to do with
“consumer choice.” Not only may the tasks and goals of people in developing regions be
unfamiliar to the designers, but the very way in which tasks and goals are understood and
measured may be unfamiliar. For example, most participants at CSCW implicitly assume
that “efficiency” is a desirable characteristic of a good system. But in some parts of the
developing world, a “solution” that requires ten people to work (and therefore provides
work for ten people) may be more desirable than one that only requires one person.
Attempting to resolve the issues implied by these quandaries suggests that design teams
must gain considerable local knowledge in order to do a credible job. However, there are
many practical issues involved in doing this. It is expensive. It is disruptive of the lives
of the designers and their families. Requiring extensive first-hand knowledge of every
new situation calls into question whether or not HCI can really be a cumulative
enterprise. If knowledge can be cumulative, that will probably require a range of
methods of creating and sharing knowledge beyond the “traditional” scientific
representations of laws and mathematical equation. Other approaches that may prove to
have a more reasonable balance between capturing unique characteristics of situations
and enduring principles might include Pattern Languages, Stories, Cultural Probes, and
Personae. Here I focus on the possible use of Stories as one such method.

2. The best selling sports book of all time is a small book by a long-time golf teacher,
Harvey Penick called "The Little Red Book." In this book, he essentially "teaches" golf
by means of a series of short stories (without diagrams or photographs). Many people
find this book extremely useful in improving their golf game. Given that golf is a largely
psychological and psychomotor game played in a physical environment, I believe this is a
rather remarkable and salient testimony about the power of story to convey tacit
knowledge. In a series of recent workshops on HCI and International and Community
Development, the participants decided that stories would serve as a good way to capture
and share knowledge gained from fieldwork. The author has since been working on a
template for such stories and the description of a process for composing such stories
based on what is known about how to capture and construct effective stories.
Stories "work" partly because they access and leverage the knowledge already
accumulated in an adult rather than trying to construct complex cognitive structures
piecemeal from the "bottom up." Adults typically learn new “chunks” of knowledge at a
rate of only 1 every four seconds. On the other hand, at that rate, a 40-year adult has
already stored 160 million chunks. This preexisting knowledge can be accessed,
stimulated, and rearranged at a much higher rate than creating new knowledge.
Not only do the actual words used in a story trigger these preexisting knowledge
structures. Additional knowledge structures can be stimulated, accessed, and rearranged
by association and by various kinds of inference. For example, if one reads the sentence,
“Joe kicked the cat across the room” the reader infers far more based on several
categories including specific similar experiences, hierarchical class relations, knowledge
of human behavior, knowledge of general cultural “scripts” and spatial-temporal
relations. Such inferences quickly blossom to a very large number. Examples that might
reasonably be inferred from the single sentence above might include the following.
Joe is human. Joe is a primate. (Since Joe is a primate, he may feel jealousy). Joe is a
mammal. (Joe probably has hair). Joe is a vertebrate. (Joe wants to avoid death; feels
pain; has a spine, etc.) Joe is a living being. Joe is a physical object. (Joe can only be in
one place at a time). Joe is upset. Something happened to initiate Joe’s current upset
state. Joe is indoors. The cat is not happy. The cat is a mammal. The cat is a vertebrate.
The cat is a living thing. The cat is an object. The cat might be injured. Joe’s nervous
system is at least partially intact. (He has emotions, spatio-temporal muscular
coordination, etc.)
Not only can short stories (or even small fragments of stories) cause a very large number
of propositions to be inferred about the subject matter of the story; as a reader begins
reading (or listening) to a story, the reader may also begin making reasonable inferences
about the larger context of the story, the teller of the story, and about the overall structure
of the story. As examples of these types of inferences, consider the following story
fragment.

3. “When Joe came to me complaining of an incurable slice I asked him to go through his
normal routine and I could see the problem, just as big and mean as a charging Texas
Longhorn before he even started his backswing. I said, ‘Whoa! Hold it right there, Joe!’
What can we tell from this single statement? First, what can we infer about the teller?
We can reasonably infer that the teller of this story is something of a golf expert. Of
course, we can also infer many other things. The teller is an English-speaking human
being and therefore has the characteristics of human beings, of mammals, of vertebrates,
of living things, and of objects in the physical world. The teller can see. He or she uses
outrageous metaphors. The teller uses complex sentence structures. Although this small
story fragment is a narrative “about” a set of events that happened some time in the past,
it communicates a tremendous amount of information about the teller of the story. This is
not atypical, but illustrates an important mechanism for the transfer of tacit knowledge
when experts share stories with novices. Not only are they narrating events that may
prepare novices for future similar events. Perhaps just as importantly, they are
communicating their values, perceptions, strategies, and so on. Implicitly, this story
fragment is saying, “If you want to be an expert golf instructor like me, you too should
eventually reach the state where presumably subtle errors in the set-up should be very
salient to you.” In terms of using stories for HCI in International Development, this
suggests that more valuable knowledge can be shared to the extent that the teller of the
story is a potential user or stakeholder, rather than a visitor.
A story fragment also communicates something about the context in which the narration
is taking place. For those readers who are familiar with the “script” of going to see a golf
pro, a lot of non-explicit information is conveyed; for instance, we would expect the
person to pay for this lesson. We would expect them to listen to the advice and try to put
it into practice and become better as a result. We expect that the golf pro is going to try
to help the person become a better golfer and fix the problem that they see and so on.
Any one of these script-based inferences could be contradicted by the larger story
context. For instance, if we learn that the student is a lifelong friend or close relative,
perhaps no payment will be made. If we explicitly learn that the student is too stubborn
to apply the lesson, then we don’t expect them to improve. If it turns out in the broader
context that the instructor has some reason to hate the student, they may give them
intentionally bad advice and so on. Any of the kinds of reasonable inferences that we
make about context based on our understanding of the typical script can be contradicted,
but only if it is done so by the storyteller with the addition of specific information that
“re-frames” the context.
Human communication also tends to embed metadata about the communication within
the communication itself. For example, in the story fragment above, we now expect that
the storyteller is going to relate a dialogue between the teller/teacher and the student. If
this is the beginning of a story, we have some notion of the size and scope of the story to
follow. This is not the end of the communication. But it is also not a likely beginning for
a full-length novel. There is every reason to believe the story will continue in English
and in print. It is likely to be presented in a consistent font. Chances are, since this much
has been in grammatical if colloquial prose, the rest of the message will continue in that

4. vein. The genre here is true-life narrative. We do not expect Extraterrestrials or
Leprechauns to leap out and help our golfer.
The communication also tells us about the subject matter at hand; what is inferred is far
greater than what is stated explicitly. Some of the tacit knowledge about golf that is
communicated in such a short fragment includes the following. 1). One may have a
problem with one’s swing and yet not know what that problem is. 2). If the set up to a
golf swing is wrong, there is going to be trouble; there is no reliable way to correct the
problem by compensating in the back-swing and downswing. 3). Golfers have a normal
routine that they go through before actually swinging. 4). A slice is something generally
undesirable in golf. 5). Some set up problems will result in a slice. 6). In golf, people
often use a medical ailment metaphor. Often, the “patient” first tries to treat the
“disease” themselves and only when self-diagnosis and treatment fail, do they then go to
a professional. 7). For the “cure” to work, it is important to prevent the “patient” from
continuing the incorrect behavior as soon as possible.
Far from being atypical, the above cases illustrate several important features that are
normally true about stories. 1. Each story conveys knowledge, not only about “subject
matter” but also conveys knowledge about the teller, the context, and the rest of the
communication. 2. The amount of knowledge that is activated in the mind of the listener
or reader is far greater than the relatively small amount of information that is explicitly
stated in the story. From a few explicit statements, thousands of reasonably certain
inferences can be made. All told, in fact, what is explicitly presented in a story represents
a very small fraction of the total number of related statements that are being manipulated
in the reader’s mind.
In the example above, however, part of the reason we can infer so much is that we share
many cultural assumptions with the storyteller. In telling stories about other cultures, the
tables are often turned in that, much of the interest in the story is in the way that our own
cultural biases and assumptions are brought to the fore by the contrast to those of another
culture. For example, when I first visited Japan, I went to breakfast and managed to say
good morning and the greeters said good morning and I said good morning and they said
good morning… but they clearly wanted “something else” to happen before I say down to
order breakfast. It turned out that the “something else” was to pay for breakfast upon
entry whereupon they gave me a wooden chip to lay on the table to prove I had paid.
There was no ordering; everyone had the same breakfast. This “story” is mildly
interesting to some Americans precisely because it violates cultural assumptions. The
“story” for Japanese would be quite different. It would be about how dense the visiting
American was and how he tried to go sit down to breakfast without even paying.
Even though we believe stories are a good way to capture and share a lot of knowledge
quickly and in a form that is interesting and memorable, there are still many tensions
involved in using stories as part of a design process for another culture. For instance,
how are stories constructed? Who participates in the storytelling? Who “owns” the
story? How can we know that people from another culture are portrayed in way that is
not insulting or even damaging to them? How do we know just how representative this

5. story is? More broadly, when are stories a useful technique and when are Pattern
Languages, for instance, or Persona a better way to cumulate knowledge?
We do not have the answers to all these questions but will continue to keep them in mind
over the next few years as people in the community attempt to share and create stories.
We expect both the story template and the associated process to evolve.
An example of a lesson learned so far from a story concerns the adoption of technology
in an African village. In that cultural context, the village elders were the respected
“experts” on everything and held the power. They had much more difficulty learning to
use a mobile device than young boys. However, it was possible to introduce the mobile
technology provided that they were “owned” by the elders and the younger boys merely
“used” the mobile phones in response to orders from the elders.
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Biography.
John received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1971 and
managed a research project in the psychology of aging for 2.5 years at Harvard Medical
School. He joined IBM Research in 1973 and conducted research in query languages,
natural language processing, design problem solving, audio systems, and speech
synthesis. In 1986, he began the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at NYNEX Science
and Technology, rejoining IBM in 1998 to manage a project on the business use of stories
and storytelling. He has over 200 publications and invited presentations in HCI. In 1992,
and 1993, he co-led two-day CHI workshops on cultural issues in HCI. More recently, he

6. co-led workshops on HCI and International and Community Development at CHI 2007,
CHI 2008 and DIS 2008.