Collaborative storytelling for sharing digital photos in offline communities

Abstract

With the emergence of smart devices, taking photos in offline communities has become part of everyday life. However, photo sharing demands additional effort and is generally performed only by highly motivated people. We suggest storytelling as a way to trigger and sustain photo sharing within an offline community. In this project, two observational pilot studies envision how storytelling empowers community members to share their digital photos. In the first study, we observed that creating a story on a large photo wall drew the attention of a community and that some members actively participated by adding more photos and narratives. We then interviewed both active and passive members and concluded that scaffolding storytelling tasks would help more people to participate. In the second study, we conducted a group workshop on utilizing a 4-frame cartoon format when creating stories with digital photos. Using the format, participants easily learned what to do and collaborated with each other to complete a series of stories. Based on the studies, we conclude with design implications for implementing a system for sharing digital photos via storytelling.