This project seeks to create a framework for narrative-centered computing (NCC) that will help children reason more effectively about (a) the distributed chains of causation that mediate environmental change, and (b) how they can intervene effectively within those chains. The NCC framework begins with a new mechanism for computational storytelling called spatiotemporal anchoring. Spatiotemporally anchored stories consist not of a linear "filmstrip," but instead of a network of story nodes. Each node depicts a small element of the overall plot, and is anchored to a specific location in space and time. To advance the story, users explore a rich geographical representation of the relevant spatiotemporal locale, discovering story nodes and the interconnections between them. Because nodes can be anchored at variable levels of spatiotemporal resolution and interlinked in non-linear ways, exploring these narratives will help children to develop more nuanced abilities for reasoning about distributed causation and variable scale. These abilities, in turn, will translate into more effective engagement with environmental issues.
While focusing on a particular topic in education, this project seeks to develop a new information technology method for enhancing human cognitive abilities in general. A striking feature of our global environmental predicament is the disparity between the breadth of the problem and the limited nature of humanity's current response. This disconnection may reflect underlying limitations on our intuitive cognitive and emotional processes. As organisms that are adapted to "humansized" scales of complexity and causation, we lack effective means for reasoning about the kinds of temporally, spatially, and socially distributed interactions that drive environmental phenomena. This innovative research seeks to address this problem and to overcome our difficulties in reasoning about distributed data by focusing instead upon our substantial ability to connect to stories.
The NCC framework also includes novel interaction mechanisms through which users can influence unfolding events in a story world via targeted behaviors in the real world. These mechanisms will allow children to see how their own environmentally relevant patterns of behavior, mediated by intuitively understandable causal mappings, could cause positive or negative changes in a story ecosystem. This feedback between user's actions and the unfolding story will have powerful implications for children's developing sense of environmental responsibility. The data that drives these interaction mechanisms will also provide a natural means of evaluating the effectiveness of this research. As a way of testing and refining the NCC framework, the research will include the creation of a testbed interactive narrative, to be deployed online and as a temporary science museum exhibit. This narrative will use spatiotemporal anchoring along with video and traditional cinematographic techniques to dramatize the interactions that take place within a representative California ecosystem, for example, a marine environment in which sea otters, kelp forests, and sea urchins all interact. The behavioral impact and educational effectiveness of this narrative will be evaluated both via the aforementioned data collection mechanisms as well as through interviews with users.
This research will make a significant contribution to Human-Centered Computing by developing a novel approach to embedding complex distributed phenomena in an interactive narrative format. The spatiotemporal anchoring technique developed here will be useful not just in the context of the present environmental system, but in a variety of other domains such as formal pedagogy (e.g., interactive narratives for understanding other STEM topics), social networking, games (e.g., massively multiplayer worlds in which players create story nodes to drive the plot), and personal information architecture (e.g., a geographically-anchored personal life history device). By focusing on children as the target audience, this research will also make substantial contributions to the emerging domain of child-centered computing. In particular, this work will lay the foundation for further investigation into how story and narrative can be used to create computational systems that even very young children can readily utilize. The environmental themes of the system will also conform to both national and California state guidelines for science education, thus giving it the potential to be broadly deployed in formal classroom settings as well as in informal learning contexts such as homes and science museums.
