I am Pragati Singh, a 2nd-year MS-HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) student and a Graduate Research Assistant in the DILAC Lab. Since the spring semester, my DILAC responsibilities led me to work on very diverse projects and it has been a tremendous learning journey so far. One of the most significant projects was designing and developing an online exhibit/collection surrounding the integration of a high school in rural Coffee County, Georgia. It is an audio/visual memory project that includes oral accounts and interviews from various individuals who grew up during the period of federally-mandated integration of schools between 1964-1972.
The project is historically significant because it gives voice to the integration experience of those in small towns and rural communities who might otherwise be lost or neglected. Because rural communities can lack the resources and platforms to preserve and share their experiences, the project attempts to preserve the memories of large-scale social change upending a small town.
As a designer, coming from a different country and background, this project helped me to gain first-hand experience in digital media and design philosophy. Being an outsider, the biggest concern was to be in the right frame of mind, learn as much as possible, and be able to do justice to the storytelling. Especially when we are telling someone else’s story, even though our role is limited to creating the experience and not the content, as a designer we do get to decide how that story will be told.
Reflecting on the project, I realised that I did bring my biases, social-cultural and aesthetic sensibilities which seeped into my creations without me evening realising. As one stumbles upon such situations, it becomes crucial for us designers to be cognizant of how our sensibilities and values manifest in our design decisions and how can we try to bridge the gap between us and the stories.
Cultural design questions I had to consider included “How do we tell stories across a racial divide in the same visual space provided by the interface?” “Can we jumble all the stories together?” “If not, how does the choice of the arrangement of the stories fit into the narrative of integration?” In this case, I created a two-column layout and all the stories of the black community were put on the left-hand side, while that of white people were put on the right side. While I think it is problematic to maintain real-world segregation in my design, it was more important to demonstrate the separation of the community members themselves speak to in the tapes in the interface itself. The choice, while difficult, makes legal segregation present for large portions of the user base who may have no first-hand experience with the institution. This a very small example of why justice to digital storytelling, in this case, required making very conscious political and ideological choices that go beyond user-centred design.
If given a chance, I have to iterate over the design, the result might change or stay similar, but the process of arriving at it will be more informed and conscious. For instance, we had created audio snippets from the original interviews and turned them into a gallery of memories, to give the audience more choice, but reflecting on it, I found that it needs more thought. Though the snippets give more choice to the audience, they might lead to a detached experience. If we translate the online experience to a face-to-face conversation, then clipping the whole interview might be equal to interrupting people while they are telling their story. As in the case of face-to-face conversation, this will seem to be insensitive, in an online set-up, there would be no way of gauging the response. The question arises how do we strike the right balance between creating an engaging experience for the audience and at the same time enable empathy and sensitise them to the stories.
Thinking about interface design, the current design gives a lot of visual space for the audience to wander away and not be fully immersed. By visual space, I mean the empty white space that we have right now which leans more towards an archive rather storytelling. Although it was the first iteration, rethinking through it, a good starting point would be to begin from the emotions we want to evoke.
As all of this comes with a risk of trying to re-inventing the wheel, to avoid late realisations, I learned that it is important to have a framework grounded in the theoretical understanding of digital humanities and storytelling. Maybe we need more art than the design or think of ourselves, not as designers but artists whose canvas is an electronic screen and a keyboard, maybe we need to change our vocabulary to enable us to think beyond human-computer-interaction, where the medium doesn’t become bigger than the message. More than anything, these are the thoughts that need to be carefully evaluated and understood before we jump into making and doing.