within a Collaborative Work Team1
Martin A. Siegel
School of Informatics Indiana University
901 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47408
msiegel@indiana.edu
Abstract
This panel focuses on the role that technology can play in supporting creative communities and in creating a discourse that can lead to creative and innovative ideas within that community. Our view of creativity and innovation is that it mostly develops in small steps as individual and community transformations rather than as creative leaps. The paper explores the design of a narrative tool, WisdomTools Scenarios™, as a vehicle for generating successive group insights as a set of transformations. Particular focus is paid to collaborative work teams and the design of conversation spaces. We are reminded that the story transforms the team as the team transforms the story. We end this paper by suggesting new directions for such interactive narrative tools.
1 Insight as Creativity and Innovation Implementation
While perusing the bargain selections at the local bookstore I came upon How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day (Gelb, 1998). Practice the seven steps and you too can be the next Leonardo. If only it were that simple. Creativity – the act of generating a new idea or insight to a problem, or as Dorst (2003, p. 17) suggests, “the moment of insight at which a problem-solution pair comes together” – rarely occurs as a creative leap, a “Eureka!” or an “AHA!” Rather, creativity is a step-wise progression to an insight that satisfies a problem-solution space. Shneiderman (2000), too, focuses on evolutionary versus revolutionary creativity and identifies eight activities that support creativity: searching and browsing, consulting with peers and mentors, visualizing data and processes, thinking by free association, exploring solutions, composing artifacts and performances, reviewing and replaying session histories, and disseminating results.
In work team settings, West (2002, p. 356-357) distinguishes between creativity and innovation implementation: “Creativity is the development of ideas while innovation implementation is the application of ideas (e.g., for new and improved products, services, or ways of working) in practice.” West further argues that “external demands on the team inhibit creativity or idea generation but encourage the implementation of creative ideas—or innovation implementation” (West, 2002, p. 356). For these work teams their problem sets are characterized as complicated, messy, and stubbornly persistent (Sternberg, 1985). Few rules govern the problem-solution space, and when procedures or guidelines are offered they vary as a function of context or circumstance.
In this paper we ask how interactive tools may be used to support work teams so that they may develop insight, both as an idea as well as the application of the idea (creativity and innovation implementation). The tools may be used in a training setting, simulating the problem-solution space, or the team may find itself tasked with navigating their way through real problems. In either case, new interactive tools are needed to facilitate insight within work teams, and oddly, we discover one such tool in a format as old as humankind itself: storytelling.
2 Storytelling
Why is storytelling the starting point for a set of interactive tools that can impact the development of insight in work teams? To answer this question, we need to examine early storytelling. We begin with Homer, who lived about 700
1
This paper will be presented at the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, July 26, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA as part of the panel on Creativity and Innovation.
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 1
B.C.E. in Greece and who is referred to as the “father” of Western literature. He composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, each roughly 15,000 lines of recited poetry. My colleague in new media design, Jeffrey Bardzell, and medieval literature scholar, unlocked for me the structure and purpose of these epic poems (personal communication, October 6, 2004). To summarize Professor Bardzell: The poems followed a strict meter – dactylic hexameter – 18 syllables per line with special stress. They were highly formulaic, including epithets (“gray-eyed goddess Athena”), familiar scenes (banquets, funerals), and traditional stories (the Trojan War). What literary scholars discovered is that these rigid structures permitted Homer and other bards the ability to deliver epic poetry in dactylic hexameter while composing in real time during a recital performance! Even as these formulae enabled composition, they also constrained innovation; as a result, these formulae effectively ensured that the content of the poems changed only minimally across generations. And this is the part of the history that needs to be emphasized. The poems became the cultural repository of Greek culture. The formulae communicated to the ancient Greeks how to hold a marriage, a funeral, or a religious ritual. Oral epic poems taught them how to behave toward gods, how to form armies, and how to conduct oneself in battle; the poems even taught the Greeks how to tell stories, learn epic, and appreciate bards. The poetic structure was a kind of “cultural technology” that controlled and shaped the society that used them. There was no other literature, philosophy, history, or science outside of these poems. At the same time, the culture maintained the poetic structures. For the ancient Greeks, epic poetry and culture were inextricably bound; the medium was the message!
While most people today are unable to compose epic poetry, they do tell stories. Brown & Duguid (2000) describe the way many Xerox reps perfected their craft. Technicians shared stories with their counterparts about how they solved today’s problem. “The constant storytelling – about problems and solutions, about disasters and triumphs, over breakfast, lunch, and coffee… generate a coherent account of what the problem is and how to solve it. They may do this individually, putting their own story together. Or they can do it collectively, as they draw on the collective wisdom and experience of the group” (Brown & Duguid, 2000, p. 106). Like the epic poems shaping ancient Greek culture, the Xerox reps’ stories influenced how machines were fixed; similarly, their stories changed training practice at Xerox. Or to state this more generally, one of the most important embodiments of knowledge and culture is storytelling. The story becomes the structure for profound human interaction and, simultaneously, the humans become inseparable from the story; they become the story.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children”
3 Interactive Narrative
Work teams may be local (all team members in the same room) or they may be distributed (team members in different rooms, different parts of the globe, and different time zones). Distributed teams are more common in recent years and often they persist over weeks or months depending on the problem(s) to be addressed. Bringing team members together in a single location is expensive, in terms of the high cost of travel and the amount of time away from other non-related but essential work tasks. Distance technologies such as video conferencing and “net” meetings reduce the costs significantly. But other than gathering the work team around a virtual table, the distance technologies do not facilitate insight – creativity or innovation implementation. If we turn to story as the vehicle for generating insight, then we need to think about how story might be implemented in distributed environments. Three characteristics are essential:
• Authenticity. Any story told in a work environment must be realistic; it must “ring true” to the listener
and it must connect directly to that person’s work life. The story may be about leadership, marketing strategies, or product invention; but whatever its theme, it must be situated in the listener’s setting. A marketing manager at Pfizer will be more interested in business development stories related to the pharmaceutical industry than the automotive industry. However, a marketing manager will be more engaged in a story about Pfizer development than about Eli Lilly development. And if the manager is part of a team exploring new ways to market Celebrex® (a Pfizer drug used in the reduction of joint pain with patients suffering from arthritis) in light of negative FDA commentary, then a story about creative ways
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 2
•
•
to expand business around another controversial Pfizer drug would be best. Authenticity increases the listener’s attention and identification. Even with a fictitious story the listener will attend to and identify with the characters and scenes if they are authentic.
Collaboration. In the Xerox rep case, the power of stories emerged from the shared wisdom of the workers. Likewise, it is important for more than one person to interact with the story. The story provides the perspectives of multiple characters. But members of the work team provide their own perspectives. It is from this collaborative effort that insights emerge. The wisdom is in the collective.
Conversation. An authentic story presented to a collaborative work team prompts a conversation. We hypothesize that the conversation initially serves to bond the team and to create team norms for interaction. The first conversations are about the story, but as the story unfolds the conversation deepens. Deep conversation is what leads to insight. The insights emerge from a new story that is created by the collaborative work team. The real story is not the original story told but the story that evolves from the team. Each insight transforms the story and leads to the next insight (Figure 1).
Insights Time
Figure 1: Team transformation and the development of insights
Storytelling that is authentic, collaborative, conversational, and fits within a distributed digital framework we call “interactive narrative.” It is interactive because the collaborative team engages in a conversation; it is narrative because storytelling is what prompts the conversation. Obviously, interactive narrative can appear in a variety of forms and for multiple purposes, including entertainment. One group, WisdomTools, Inc., developed interactive narrative for the purpose of facilitating insight within collaborative teams (Siegel & WisdomTools Product Development Team, 1999-2005). Their interactive narrative tool is called WisdomTools Scenarios™, and we shall describe it in the next section2.
4 Scenarios
Scenarios are stories that are revealed over time as a series of episodes in a distributed, asynchronous web format to a collaborative team of users (the work team). Each episode includes characters and scenes, arranged in a timeline format (Figure 2), and each scene is associated with one or more characters. Scenes are small segments of the story and appear in a variety of formats: dialogue, e-mail message, voice mail, phone call, FAX, video, magazine article,
2
The author of this paper is the founder of WisdomTools and principle designer of the interactive narrative tool Scenarios.
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 3
newspaper story, and so on. The key is that the scene is realistic, and authenticity can be achieved by using story artifacts.
4.1 Basic Structure
A typical scenario contains three episodes, and each is time-revealed; that is, succeeding episodes are displayed after a period of time has passed (typically one week). Thus a three-episode scenario typically is seen over a three-week timeframe.
The scenario itself is pre-designed by a development team that includes professional interactive storytellers and instructional designers (e.g., WisdomTools staff) and subject matter experts (experienced staff from the work team’s organization). Together, this development group creates the scenario using an authoring framework and mounts the story on the web for the collaborative work team to experience. One or more teams may use the scenario simultaneously, each person interacting with it in their own time and place.
Figure 2: Scenarios episode timeline showing character and scene links
The objectives of the scenario will vary as a function of the work team’s goals. For example, a work team composed of city hall managers charged with developing creative solutions for overcoming hate crimes in their city may experience a scenario of how another city handled hate crimes in their community. Or to take another example, imagine a work team tasked with the problem of how to increase employee sensitivity and appropriate action when they encounter subtle ethical dilemmas. A scenario focusing on the kinds of ethical dilemmas encountered might lead to new insights on how to prevent employee misconduct before it occurs and how to manage misconduct after it is discovered. One might argue that Scenarios is an expensive tool for facilitating insights given the time and
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 4
resources required to create the scenario before the work team may begin. But if the tool, in the case of the hate crimes scenario, leads to safer cities, or in the case of the ethical dilemmas scenario, leads to new ways to prevent the company from lawsuits or worse, then the investment is minor in comparison to the results. Each problem, therefore, needs to be examined for its importance. Scenarios would not be advised for a typical work team that meets once or twice to accomplish its task. But if the tasked problem were of sufficient consequence for the organization and the work team is expected to meet over many meetings, then it may be effective and cost-efficient to use an interactive narrative tool to stimulate deep conversation leading to insights and appropriate individual and team action.
4.2 Conversation Space
The conversation space, in the form of discussion forums, is distributed throughout the scenario. Each conversation is linked to a scene. Figure 3 shows a scene linked from the episode timeline; it uses dialogue and video as its format. Notice that a “discussion” tab (circled) is a link from the scene. Each conversation begins with a prompt – a question or a series of question to begin the conversation. For example, in the scenario, “A Community
Figure 3: Scene linked from the episode timeline; discussion tab highlighted (circled)
Response to Hate,” the first conversation includes this prompt: “Where is the line between hate speech and free speech? Suppose hate speech can be directly responsible for violence against the minority. Did the person who put the leaflet on the porch have the right to do this? A legal right? A moral right? What would be ‘offensive’ to you? Would everyone consider this offensive? Consider the questions and concepts posed above, and construct your response. Return to this activity later and view the other team members' contributions.” (WisdomTools, Inc., 2002). This prompt is linked from the scenario’s first scene:
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 5
Michael and his five year old son are walking home from the Fourth of July parade downtown. Brandon: (exuberantly) That was a great parade. That float that passed out candy was really awesome. Michael: It figures you’d like that one best. But the point of Independence Day is that we are celebrating our freedom.
Brandon: (bounding up the porch) Okay, Daddy, but can I have some more candy? (spots a leaflet, entitled \"White Power!\" beside the door) What’s this? Michael: (Frowning, he snatches the leaflet from Brandon and quickly scans it.). Stupid trash! Brandon: What is it? (Molly also looks inquisitively at Michael.)
Michael: Don’t worry about it. Let’s go get that cupcake. (Brandon dashes toward the kitchen and Michael glances at Molly.) We’ve got some really hateful people in this world. It’s a document filled with crap about Jews and blacks. Best to ignore it (smashes it into the kitchen trash, making sure to push it into the coffee grinds and eggshells).” (WisdomTools, Inc., 2002)
For insights to emerge, the participants must engage in a deep conversation in the discussion forum. The concept of “deep conversation” is difficult to define, but one can gain a sense of the meaning by imagining the following situation: Two close friends are traveling together in a car late at night, the trip is long, and they engage in a conversation. Before long the two friends are sharing details of their lives; the conversation may meander from topic to topic but the conversation is likely to be characterized as intimate, vulnerable, risky, equitable, long, and filled with detail. Similarly, a deep conversation among work team members is likely to be characterized in similar ways. These conversations will include the sharing of successes and failures, missed opportunities and close calls, anxieties and triumphs, and plots and subplots. From such conversations emerge new insights leading to innovation implementation – new and improved products, services, or ways of working.
Discussion forums are one form of conversation space. But there can be others too. Within Scenarios, for example, there is a “point of view” activity. A statement is provided and the participant writes a counterpoint to the statement. Once the counterpoint is written, the participant is able to read the other team members’ responses. A lively point-counterpoint dialogue ensues.
5 Future of Interactive Narrative Tools
As we look to the future, we imagine improvements in the design of interactive narrative tools:
• Design of deep conversation space. For the last 25 years, discussion forums have fundamentally shared
the same design – base notes and responses, and in some cases, responses to the responses (and so on). These structures best serve the needs of question and answer interactions, but they do not well serve the needs of deep conversation space. New forms are beginning to emerge, from blogs to wikis, but more research is required to create the kind of space that will yield safe, reflective deep conversations. The author and his graduate students took some first steps in improving conversation space in Scenarios (Siegel, Ellis, & Lewis, 2004). • Design of realistic story space. As Moore’s Law continues, we will see more powerful computing
environments. We can imagine story spaces that are dynamic three-dimensional spaces. We are far away from the Star Trek Holodeck, but modern software tools will allow developers to render realistic spaces for us to roam (see, for example, Murray, 1997 for early descriptions of this digital frontier; see the Liquid Narrative Project for more recent work). Game designers are leading the way. Figure 4 illustrates a dynamic three-dimensional timeline that could be used in the Scenarios tool. • Design of authoring tools. Currently, professional teams are required to build interactive narratives.
Under the best of circumstances it takes from three to six weeks to design and implement a web-based scenario. In the future it should be possible to reduce this production time to a few days or a few hours.
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 6
•
New authoring tools will empower not only professional development teams but the work teams themselves; in the future they may build their own stories to navigate.
Design of multiple, simultaneous stories. The best fiction writers often embed stories within stories. We imagine that in the future it will be possible to do the same with interactive narrative tools. Imagine experiencing one story and then finding its characters appearing in another. Or consider experiencing one story, beginning another and then a third. At some point one or more of the stories merges with the others. Stories may become layered in intricate ways yielding new effects. New kinds of interactive story writers will emerge as well. Again, the first signs of these developments are in electronic game designs (see, for example, Bizzocchi & Woodbury, 2003).
Figure 4: Dynamic three-dimensional episode timeline
Interactive narrative tools can have a profound effect on the creativity and innovation of collaborative work teams. The story stimulates a deep conversation among the team members, and from this conversation emerge new insights. These interactions create a new narrative – the team’s story. The focus shifts from the pre-produced scenario to the story created by the team. The team becomes the story.
6 Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the deep conversations with my colleagues Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell.
7 References
Bizzocchi, J. & Woodbury, R. F. (2003). A case study in the design of interactive narrative: The subversion of the interface. Simulation and Gaming, 34 (4), 550-568.
Brown, J.S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press. Dorst, K. (2003). Understanding design. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.
Gelb, M. J. (1998). How to think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven steps to genius every day. New York: Delacorte Press.
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 7
Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace. New York: Free Press.
Shneiderman, B. (2000). Creating creativity: User interfaces for supporting innovation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7 (1), 114-138.
Siegel, M. A. & WisdomTools Product Development Team (1999-2005), WisdomTools Scenarios [software]. Bloomington, IN: WisdomTools, Inc.
Siegel, M.A., Ellis, S. E., & Lewis, M. B. (2004). Designing for deep conversation in a scenarios-based e-learning environment. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Teaching critical thinking, part 1: Are we making critical mistakes? Phi Delta Kappan, 67, 194-198.
West, M. A. (2002). Sparkling fountains or stagnant ponds: An integrative model of creativity and innovation implementation in work groups. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 51 (3), 355-424.
WisdomTools, Inc. (2002). A community response to hate. Retrieved August 7, 2002, from http://wtscenarios.com/communityresponse
M. Siegel • Interactive Narrative Tools • © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers • Page 8
因篇幅问题不能全部显示，请点此查看更多更全内容