Interaction and Verisimilitude. How Narration Can Foster the Design Process

Abstract

The role of narrative in the construction of an interaction design project is relevant since the very beginning of the discipline, when scholars in the 1990s pointed out how the whole dialogue between human and computer was developed like a theater work. Actually, the use of narrative was, and still is, focused on the unfolding of the user experience with a product/service, following the story arc and using analysis and prediction tools like journey maps. If this approach corresponds to the state of the art for many scholars and practitioners, there is a large debate on in the process that involves storytelling techniques, especially during the concept generation and the branching of the interactions between people and artifacts’ system. In particular, design fiction and speculative design give a strong relevance to the creation not only of a story line but, above all, of the world building, where people and artifacts interacts inside a sketched out future scenario, letting the audience free to speculate, for example, on impacts on the society, ethical issues, acceptance levels. In this situation the narrative approach can be included into the interaction design process during all the phases, in order to foster designers to generate future-able artifacts strictly connected to Personas depicted as they were characters, placed in verisimilitude-based worlds. The paper will describe the results of this methodological experimentation focusing on the differences occurred to two different projects: basic research, research for a company.