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s3

denisse — 2014-03-12T13:41:40Z

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Storytelling and Technology - Sartaj Anand

denisse — 2014-03-12T11:43:19Z

This post outlines the general characteristics of storytelling. The second section is an interview with Sartaj Anand, the founder of EgoMonk and BIllion Strong, who talks about storytelling as a strategy to build trust at the intersections of business and technology. This is the first of a series of installments exploring the potential of storytelling for social change.

CHANGE-MAKER: Sartaj Anand

ORGANIZATION: EgoMonk & Billion Strong

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Leverage technology by focusing on the relationship between people and technology, and build trust by localizing and personalizing communication

METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling

“We all have something to say. Question is: will anyone listen?”

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud, 1994

Today, everybody seems to be talking about ‘storytelling’. From activists to corporates; they are all jumping on this nostalgic bandwagon and embracing once again an enthralling habit of yesteryear: the ability to tell good stories. The practice has taken an identity of its own. It's distancing itself from its roots in oral tradition, and morphing into a state-of-the-art communication strategy. This is no selfless trend, though. Behind the hype, lies their thirst for (your) attention, and the belief that they do not only have a story to tell, but that it is a story that matters. In the context of “making change” particularly, when political and social crises emerge, the public space is flooded by a series of narratives and discourses as told by different actors. This explosion of stories culminates in an overload of information that could end up saturating its intended audience. This is not only undesirable, but dangerous when underneath the noise lies a message important for human dignity and survival. So, what is it about a story that will make it worthy of your attention? And how can this seemingly simple, yet complex tactic culminate in further engagement?

To explain storytelling as a method to create change, I will focus on how this practice can be utilized to enhance visibility and effectiveness of advocacy practices, as outlined in the research overview. I will start by unpacking ‘storytelling’: focusing on its purpose and functions. I will also look at the the relationship between the storyteller and the audience, and also at how storytelling redefines ‘the public space’. Although I will be putting my best effort to explain the workings behind his method, I will rely on the storytellers themselves to learn about the power of well-crafted and well-delivered stories to make change. This opportunity’s change-actors: Sartaj Anand, The Ugly Indian, Blank Noise, come from different fields and will show very different perspectives of how the narratives of change utilized in their stories, re-articulates how users/citizens/customers interact and experience content.

Telling Stories

So, what is storytelling? And what makes it so different from other forms of narration? I consulted the work of German philosophers Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to unpack the nature of this practice and its ability to transmit knowledge.

“the storyteller takes what he tells from the experience and he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening”

W. Benjamin, 1977

In Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (1955) he laments the demise of storytelling: “less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly [as if] the ability to exchange experiences [had been taken away from us]”. Having its origins in oral tradition, storytelling for the most part consists of taking experiences worth sharing and disseminating them in the community with a specific, and according to Benjamin, a useful purpose in mind. It could be a moral, a maxim or a practical advice (1977), but at the end of the day, the audience takes away a new piece of information it did not have at the beginning of the story. This lesson may be related to the past of the storyteller or one of his characters, but its value lies in how it can now be extrapolated to the audience’s future.

Ann Rippin's rendition to The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin. Visit her wordpress here.

Hannah Arendt, German-American philosopher from the early 20th century also had a lot to say about storytelling and ‘narratives’. She understood it as a framework, backed up by a strong tradition of its own, and a structure that embodies how our mind works: “the mind doesn’t simply re-create sequences of events as they occur, but it creates new sequences and integrates events into appropriate existing sequences; the mind is constantly forming narratives” (Kieslich, 2013.). This understanding of the practice goes beyond Benjamin’s proposition that we become part of the narration as it occurs. Arendt posits that our mind is already manufactured to construct sequences and connections in the same way in which we build stories -as opposed to the way we structure our essays, novels or tweets- before we tell them. Being such an embedded cognitive process, it feels familiar, comfortable and natural, which derives into a “critical appreciation” for the events of the story, and leads you to make deeper connections on how they relate to your life (Oni, 2012).

(Read more on Arendt and storytelling here: The Story of Reconciliation – Hannah Arendt Center)

However, both Benjamin and Arendt’s analysis is still very focused on the oral vs. prose question. Entering the 21st century we face the question of the role of digital technology and our highly visual culture in facilitating, amplifying or limiting the process of storytelling. On this point, I jumped to the end of the 20th century and looked at one of the many forms of storytelling: the comic. Scott McCloud’s “Understanding the Comic” (1994) takes you through the whole process of creating a coherent interplay of words and pictures that “convey information” and/or produce an “aesthetic response in the viewer”. Why are aesthetics important? , Because, according to McCloud, the inclusion of art is both the rejection and affirmation of our human condition. On one hand, art (or how we respond to it) is a rejection to our basic instincts, allowing us to express needs beyond survival and reproduction. On the other hand, it is a vehicle through which we assert our identities as individuals and pursue a “higher purpose and truth” (1994). Digital storytelling is imbued with visual stimuli: pictures, videos, graphics, that enhance the sensory experience, and as we explored in the Information Design posts (Find Part 1:Information Activism, and Part 2: Information Design) create new (and deeper) channels to approach and understand the message delivered by these stories.

Excerpts of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

From these three perspectives we understand the following about storytelling. It is:

A practice rooted in the tradition of sharing experiences

Participatory and interactive: the experience of the storyteller becomes the experience of the audience.

The purpose of storytelling is to pass on a message, moral guidance or practical advice to the audience, through its content.

The form or structure of narratives is determined by sequences of facts and events, which is the same way we build stories in our minds.

The experiential and familiar nature of storytelling makes it easier to engage with and relate to.

The inclusion of images, art and media produces an aesthetic response in the viewer, providing the audience an opportunity for self-expression and freedom.

Translating these characteristics to the theme of the Methods for Social Change project (how to build a sense of citizenship and civicness through technology-mediated practices. More here): storytelling (re)emerges as a promising vehicle for political change, especially when in par with the “technological possibilities” of our times (Benjamin, 1977). If we choose to entertain this thought, we find how its roots in community traditions make stories an excellent meeting point to form solidarity networks and stronger offline communities to sustain activism. The logical and sequential format of stories are interesting mediums, not only to transmit new ideas on citizenship and engagement; but make them relevant and appealing. Finally, 'the moral of the stories' are seeds for introspection and reflection, that may shape how we understand our role in society as a whole. At the end of the day though, it is storytellers who will lead this journey and meeting them is the first step to gauge how the theory of storytelling unfolds in the practice.

In the next section, we will meet some of the actors utilizing this method in different fields - and there are plenty of storytellers out there, gifted in skill and practice conveying an array of messages to an equally diverse public- but before moving on I will close with an excerpt from Lisa Disch’s essay that brings all these points together:

“[Storytelling] is more adequate than arguments to depict ambiguities of a multidimensional social reality”

In other words, it is a practice that strips narratives from all ornaments, displaying the complexities of humanity in its most intuitive and experiential form.

(Story)Tellers

Great storytellers: creators who devote their resources in controlling

this medium to convey their messages effectively”

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud (1993)

Our first storyteller is Sartaj Anand; an India-based entrepreneur, founder of the innovation and strategy consulting firm: EgoMonk and active member of TED, Ashoka, Sandbox, Kairos Society and the Pearson Foundation networks (More about his work in his Social Good profile). His self-described “unreasonable dream” is to impact one billion people with his work and create “life-changing experiences”. He strives to do this by a) leveraging the relationship between people and technology and b) through his recently launched non-profit Billion Strong. Also, as opposed to other change-makers we’ve interviewed in the project, he comes from an engineering and business background; bringing a for-profit perspective into our melange of multi-stakeholder approaches to change.

The following interview touches on digital storytelling as one of the ways Anand is using to leverage technology. His vision highlights how you cannot disconnect people from the processes you are utilizing to impact their lives. Incorporating a more humane focus in the way we use technology, and in how we construct stories, is according to his experience, the best way to have practices resonate to and be appropriate for the public.

Sartaj Anand,

Founder of EgoMonk and Billion Strong

Tell us about your background and the intersections of your work with technology.

I started with an engineering background and my thesis was on language processing; figuring out how people talk and how that needs construction data. Fundamentally at some point, I figured out that technology is not the problem, people are; so that’s how I moved into my current focus in business: which is innovation strategic consulting. I frequently rely on technology to enable or actualize change but I don’t necessarily create it. The challenge is how we leverage the technology we have [...] and that’s where I can add the most value.

How do you leverage technology in the context of making change then?

I leverage technology in terms of using it but focusing on the ‘people’ side of it”: the relationship between people and technology. That’s the main intersection point. [...] This is what I mean when I talk about technology, innovation, social structures and change.

Ideas for Change from Sartaj Anand

Economically, business models have to replicate and service society. If businesses serve their people, they capture maximum value and gain efficiency over ten, twenty years (and this is appealing to all the capitalists in industrial businesses). However, towards the course of these years a lot of things can change and you progressively become more and more outdated. When you have this premonition, that's the point when you need to step in and cannibalize your own business model.

For example, for seven years, music labels sold cds only. Then Apple came in with iPods and digital music downloads. After milking this for 10 years, what it should have done is fortify it and start streaming music to capture maximum value, like Spotify did. [...] This is a model EgoMonk works with and we try to communicate these things to our clients. They have the power to execute it, but they have to internally feel confident with all their stakeholders, whether it is for-profits with their board; or non-profits with donors and program partners. This is a choice we need to commit to. A lot of the problem in the change process (technology enabled or otherwise) is trust building. At the end of the day you are working with people, and this is a challenge.

In order to build this trust you must be aiming for a deeper and personal communication with your clients. How are you including this in your business model?

We focus a lot on communication and that’s something we rely on increasingly; and I found it has to have a Why-What-How model -borrowing from Simon Sinek's gold circles. In that order.

Storytelling 101 from Sartaj Anand

People don’t buy the 'what' of it, without the 'why' you do it. For example, Apple is great because it works to improve your life, to inspire you, amuse you: make your life better. What they do comes second: Apple is an electronics company, an application company. Last is the how: It makes the iPhone. We apply a similar model and this is something I apply in my storytelling also. I’m a believer that every story has to have an end or a moral: something that is more hopeful and optimistic. Rely on that but decide that also, I’m not the only one around: stories are increasingly personal and local.

Given the personal and experiential nature of storytelling, I assume it is a challenge to mainstream it in your services. Tell us more about the practices you are using to implement it and how they break from more traditional communication practices in the past.

EgoMonk

EgoMonk is an Innovation and Strategic Management Consultancy (More about EgoMonk here). Particularly this means that:

a) We start with the hypothesis that we don't know everything. With that in mind, we borrow amazing frameworks from amazing institutions. For example, Holacracy; (a “purposeful organization” technology that changes how the organization is structured, how decisions are made and how power is distributed); 'How will you win' philosophy from traditional large companies,, where they equate every decision to a couple of questions like what's your winning aspiration?, where will you plan?, how will you win?, what capability systems/processes need to exist to make this a sustainable practice that outlives you? This approach gets us halfway there, [especially] working with people who haven't had access to this before.

EgoMonk's services

b) We localize it. We work with high impact entrepreneurs and turn their life goals into a four week plan. We frame it: What happens if after four weeks, you die. If these are four weeks you have to live: what really matters to you? What do you want to accomplish professionally and personally? Once you go through that exercise we say: What can continue sustainable during your life? What can you take away? We focus on timing and what you have to do. Once you put that concept of mortality into every day's existence, you start behaving differently.

c) We work with gamification. For example, we worked in a factory and completely changed the incentivization for their workers into something that is more fun. The challenge was: how do you improve the process of well-being in an industrial environment. How do we make working enjoyable for them? This model consists of short-term rewards: if you work really hard over this much time, you get 10 points and this gets you a (reward) with your family. This has never happened before.

Billion Strong

Billion Strong is a platform. We want to impact a billion people and mobilize a billion dollars every year. The concept behind it is that the future is completely decoupled from our reality. It is highly utopian and right now we are not there and my hypothesis is that we'll never get there because our perspectives and assumptions keep evolving. This non-profit aims to accelerate the future in our lifetime so we can at least enjoy some of its benefits. It focuses on six things: culture, mobility, technology, art, nutrition and divinity. Each of these will be used as levers to impact a billion people. In the case of Billion Strong, user adoption is the most frequent challenge you face in the non-profit space. I will explain this using our first two projects:

a) Project 1 - Divinity:
We want to take religion, God and spirituality as a lever to impact people. A manifestation of this is the release of an open source tool kit to convert religious institutions into co-working spaces.

Centers of religion are:

Everywhere and permanent

Well known by the community

Community centers

Safe

Non-profit and non-taxable

Underutilized 99% of the time

Disconnected from youth

Centers of religion have always been centers of education and community oriented, but within the last generation they've become prayer halls, and I think this is the wrong way of using this infrastructure. There are a couple of narratives being negotiated here (See box to the left).

In this case [the open source tool-kit] has a framework, and it is dynamic to the point where your choices in real time will influence the policies of this place and their physical manifestation. So you ask questions in a flow chart: Do you want men and women to work together or not?; Do you have the ability to buy new furniture or you want to use the existing furniture?; when you ask these questions you navigate a flow chart, depending on your choices. They will lead to a different output and when they see that, it is immediately empowering. This is storytelling, and this what will help us navigate the adoption issues. It's essentially us saying you own it; you know exactly what is good for your own community. In terms of the narrative, each copy will be different and adapted to its language. It has to be made for this community and everything has to be localized for that story you are telling. The religious and cultural narrative needs to be blended into it.

b) Project 2 - Nutrition:
Meat consumption is a huge challenge and highly unsustainable. We will use kick-start mechanics in a mobile app to trigger and enable change in food habits. We are obviously very digitally inclined right now. It's easy to capitalize on that, but instead of giving them money, we will ask them to skip a meal, go vegetarian for today or for the week and we are going to support that.

Adoption is a huge challenge, so we'll ask them: Where do you stay? They'll say: Amsterdam [for example], and it will provide them with a template. If you are vegetarian for today, for the week, or the month, this is your meal plan and all you need. Users will find meals close to them and won't have to worry about it anymore. And we will map their impact in real time through info-graphics and data visualization. They will be constructing and visualizing their own story in real time and we’ll present it through different narratives.

We are also looking at multi-stakeholderism in this project. Both EgoMonk and Billion Strong seem to be a combination of business, technology and communication strategies. Why multi-stakeholderism?

Three reasons:

a) The future is multi-domain. You will never understand the whole picture if you say: I’m only going to solve water, but what about the pipes, the roads, the environment, infrastructure, cultural issue. One domain is no longer good enough. You will never be a complete expert of the complete ecosystem.

b) Adoption models will always be a challenge and right now it’s a compromised formula. Now it's a zero-sum game. We literally need to escape that and make it future-oriented; make it 1+1 through partnerships.

c) Storytelling is also getting more mainstreamed into change management and multi-stakeholderism. At the end of it, if you tell a good enough story, you can sell and get people to believe in your projects. This inherently builds partnership models. There is something that is permission marketing: all sales in the future are relationship based and indirect sales.(E.g. Red Bull is all about the experience) That’s how we have to be when we talk about multi-stakeholderism. Everything needs to be built in.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

** Next installment will look at how storytelling enhances visibility and accessibility, and how it is being used by Urban Governance groups in Bangalore.**

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah (1994) Essays in Understanding Edited with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn. The literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher.p.308
Benjamin, Walter. (1977): "The storyteller."89.
Disch,Lisa Jane (1994) Hannah Arendt and the limits of Philosophy. Cornell University Press. p.172-173
Kieslich, Ingo. (2013) "Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt: Storytelling in and as theoretical writing." PhD diss., Vanderbilt University,
McCloud, Scott. (1994)."Understanding comics: The invisible art." Northampton, Mass
Oni, Peter (2012). "The Cognitive Power of Storytelling: Re-reading Hannah Arendt in a Postmodernist/Africanist Context."

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Joylita

denisse — 2014-03-12T11:28:09Z

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Joylita

denisse — 2014-03-12T11:28:22Z

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Scene from The Empire Strikes Back

denisse — 2014-03-12T11:08:55Z

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Digital Design: Human Behavior vs. Technology - Vita Beans

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:29:23Z

What comes first? Understanding human behavior and communication patterns to design digital technologies? Or should our technologies have the innate capacity to adapt to the profiles of all its potential users? This post will look at accessibility challenges for digital immigrants and the importance of behavioral science for the design of digital technologies. We interview Amruth Bagali Ravindranath from Vita Beans.

CHANGE-MAKER: Amruth B R

PRODUCT:
Vita Beans and Guru G

METHOD OF CHANGE:
Borrow elements from behavioral science and social marketing to make technology more intuitive.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
Make technology easy to use, fun and effective.

Chirptoons: Create Cartoons in a Jiffy. Designed by Vita Beans
(The animation seems to be skipping a few lines. Check box below for a transcript)
Design your own here: http://bit.ly/1dOEpPo

Transcript of animation:

Ajoy: Hi!
Usha: Hi! What will we talk about today?
Ajoy: We will learn to design digital stories!
Usha: What do you mean by digital stories?
Ajoy: What we are doing right now!.
Telling a story through a digital medium.
Usha: Oh! But what is so complicated about that?
You write a story and then you post it online What’s
the big deal?
Ajoy: This is true. But you want everyone to access
your story right?
Usha: Yes! Of course!
Ajoy: Then you need to think about your audience!
Are you sure they all know how to use this technology?
Usha: Well...no, not really.
Ajoy: Do you know what makes it challenging for them?
Or how to adapt technology to make it easier?
Usha: Eh, no...no clue :(
Ajoy: Then read on.Today we will take a step back.
We must think about human behaviour first!
and then design our technology accordingly.
Usha: Sounds good! Let's do it.

First off, apologies for such a feeble and sad animation. When I was given access to Chirptoons, I was quite confident I would be able to produce a somewhat interesting introduction to this post and get you excited about our next interview. However, between first-time user friction and a couple of glitches in the program, I found myself -a semi-savvy digital native who has been using technology, almost every day of her life, for the last 15 years- struggling to create the cartoon and clearly failing at it. The biggest challenge was translating what I had in mind into a digital format (The demo was very straightforward. I was just particularly inept), and it was frustrating to the point I decided to drop it, leave it as is, publish my unfinished cartoon and turn this post into a reflection on 'design challenges behind digital storytelling', so I could move on with my life.

What I experienced with Chirptoons is what many users: both digital natives and immigrants constantly face due to the pace at which new digital technologies are emerging. While the privileged demographic who has physical access to technology has a decent knowledge of basic web browsing and document processing features, there is still a very large gap in accessibility in terms of how to navigate more complex formats. At the end of the day, producers retain the creative power and determine the functions and flexibility of the technologies we use in the day to day. Just think of Facebook and its constant interface updates. We have all felt the wrenching need for that 'dislike' button to make our interactions a tad more honest, yet we have no power to create it or change Facebook's format to one that enables our needs better.

So far, we have explored information from different angles: as activism, as visual design, as stories; and how digital technologies have been used strategically to disseminate it. However, our analysis is lacking a better understanding of the digital. We have been focusing on citizens as technology 'consumers', and we have not looked at whether digital infrastructures are accessible enough for users to become 'producers'. The question is: how do we do this: how do we engage different users with different digital literacy levels, skills and aptitudes in the production of digital content? With this post we bring a new topic into our series: accessibility and Information infrastructures. This one will focus on design and the role of behavioural science. Our interview with Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, brought a very unique perspective into the conversation, from which I would like to highlight three points:

a) The importance of behavioral science for design. Amruth stressed why we need a thorough understanding of behavioral and cognitive science in the design of digital technologies and how crucial it is to investigate the decision processes and communication strategies of humans to make technologies user-friendly and context appropriate.

b) How public relations and social marketing concepts can also provide insight on how to target and engage potential users more effectively. This point starts to answer some of the questions we raised on the Information Design post: thinking about the citizen as a consumer. This point also works as an alternative take on how to target civic engagement through technology.

c) How to engage different type of users: not only the digital native, but also digital immigrants[1]

who still play crucial roles as information gatekeepers in fields such as education or urban governance.

Vita Beans

We interviewed Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, Founder of Vita Beans to answer some of these questions. Vita Beans’ mandate is to create inspiring, easy-to-use applications in areas of education and human resources, to share knowledge in innovative, fun an effective ways. The logic behind their technological framework is trying to mimic the profile of the human brain linked to decision making -including economic, evolutionary, emotional, and psychological elements- and design their applications based on these patterns. Some of the products they offer are cognitive skill development applications, game based learning applications, educational technology research, among others, and their latest educational product: Guru G was chosen by the Unreasonable at Sea program (by Unreasonable institute & co-founder of Stanford d.school) as one of the 11 companies changing the world.

"We are trying to adapt to how the user wants to use something, rather than expecting the user to learn. This is essential in the education space to make things work".

Guru G is a "gamified teaching, teacher training & open certification platform", that aims to democratize access to technology for quality teachers. Rather than focusing on the student as most education technologies do, Guru G believes that teachers are the most important element of the education system. Enabling teachers, means quality education will reach the lives of hundreds of students during their professional life time, and with this in mind, Vita Beans designed a platform that is engaging, easy to use and intuitive, designed specifically with teachers, schools and governments in mind.

Unreasonable Barcelona: Anand Joshi, Guru-G from Unreasonable Media on Vimeo.

Inspiration

"Teachers don't use and don't like to use technology"

The idea came from the products Vita Beans had already developed for the education space, such as their text2animation & text2game prototypes. They had produced over 80 collaborative games teachers were using in the classroom. Students play together in teams and learn about different topics through the process of gaming. However, suddenly they realized teachers had great ideas they didn't know how to translate into a digital form because they did not have the knowledge or the skills to create digital content. This is, according to Amruth, the crisis they are trying to solve in the education space: the quality of teachers, access to good teachers and the difficulty for teachers to adopt new technologies were the biggest challenges. "

The design challenge

Their initial prototypes were designed with assumptions based on their gamification experiments with students. "We miserably failed with teachers and we discovered what a good gamification system for teachers looks like by prototyping with teachers and looking at the small things. It was an interesting learning experience." They identified two common reasons why they hesitated to adopt anything new in the classroom.

Teachers don't want to feel like they can't use something a student can.
Teachers can't visualize themselves using that tool, this there is an element of uncertainty and lack of confidence.

It was imperative for Vita Beans to switch focus: "Any tool you design, you expect to train the user to understand your tool, and if they refuse to do that; you blame them." They used their behavioural science background to come up with infrastructural solutions that solve the limitations from the outset.

The solutions

They started prototyping with natural language processing for their text2animation & text2game projects. NLP is a branch of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Teachers articulated their ideas in simple English and the program used NLP to take what they said, try to understand what they were trying to visualize and convert into programming language to build an animated movie out of it (like what we used to open this article -but with hopefully better results). Amruth was very confident about the potential of this prototype and shared with us that UNICEF might take it up and implement it as an open source animated video and game creation tool in Africa.

They also developed an adaptive navigation engine for one of their game based learning platforms; a tool that adapts to what you are trying to do: "There is no fixed way to navigate from one task to another. It tries to learn the closest action that each teacher is trying to do and it executes that. It tries to learn how the teacher wants to use it."' This was a success. They incorporated touch screens to make the product more intuitive and the teachers picked it up quickly.

Amruth claims they are the first in the world to develop a gamification platform specifically for teachers and the reason was their solution to the navigation issue. This experience also indirectly helped in designing Guru-G.

"Amruth Bagali Ravindranath talks about text2animation & text2game prototypes"
Amruth B R, at TedxMcGill. Courtesy of YouTube

These design solutions and the learnings from each project inspired the team to come up with products which have been adopted commercially across 10 states in India, reached 4000+ schools & over 3 million kids internationally through partners in India & North America. They have helped education companies build their primary and secondary school education products, (including one of India's top classroom technologies), have been covered by the media and won several entrepreneurship awards. More information here and on their website. Our question is: what is it about behavioral science that helped Amruth's team arrive to this epiphany in tech design?

Behavioral Science and Social Marketing

Comparing marketing to advocacy is bound to be met by resistance and perhaps controversy. I raised this question when we interviewed Maya Ganesh for the Information Design post, and stated the following in our conclusion: "Our consumption habits in the market are shaping how we process and interact with information in the public space. The possibility of 'consumer behavior' permeating modalities of activism, reinforces the need to explore more interesting strategies for information dissemination." Now that we are starting to look closely at the infrastructure supporting information, I will stubbornly return to the same question: to what extent should we borrow tactics for advocacy from marketing? and add: how much of it should permeate the design of digital technologies?

Amruth made a casual reference during our interview that triggered this thought. We were discussing the importance of understanding behavior patterns, when he brought up Edward Bernays. This man used psychoanalysis, psychology and social science to design public persuasion campaigns and could get masses to choose what he wanted them to without them realizing it. While this sounds awfully dangerous and manipulative, I would like to rescue the idea of understanding human behavior well enough to design technology around it and I will entertain this thought in the context of social change -please, don't judge.

Pillip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, wrote a paper bringing marketing and social change together: “Can social causes be advanced more successfully through applying principles, concepts and techniques of marketing?”. He defines marketing as:

"a sophisticated technology, that draws heavily on behavioral science for clues to solve communication and persuasion related to influencing accessibility. [...] Most of the effort is spent on discovering the wants of a target audience and creating goods and services to satisfy them" (Kotler, 1971)

This definition is a useful bridge to link marketing with accessibility of digital technologies. G.D. Wiebe wrote an influential paper on social marketing, that coined the question: "Why can't you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you can sell soap?", that later influenced public information campaigns by USAID, the WHO, and the World Bank [2] . While he recognized how these models can to an extent commodify human behavior and social principles, he stressed that knowledge of behavioral science is a useful framework for product planning, that must be given a socially useful implementation. He developed the following criteria of considerations:

Criteria	Description
Force	The intensity of the person's motivation toward the goal -a combination of his predisposition prior to the message and the stimulation of the message
Direction	Knowledge of how or where the person might go to consummate his motivation.
Mechanism	The existence of an agency that enables the person to translate his motivation into action.
Adequacy	The ability and effectiveness of the agency in performing its task.
Distance	Estimate of the energy and cost required (by the user) to consummate the motivation in relation to the reward

Considering this framework is part of recognizing how knowledge circulating market networks affects our behavior. Nishant Shah addressed two ideas along these lines in the thought piece. First, he suggests us to recognize the negotiations that take place in the state-citizen-market ecosystem, and how they affect our rights, demands and responsibilities in society. Second, how this leads to a different understanding of the citizen as an "embodiment of these state-market negotiations". Keeping consumer behavior, and the forces shaping, enabling and constraining it in mind, is an interesting framework when we think of ourselves as information consumers -and as Yochai Benkler posits in The Wealth of Networks- in an ongoing transition to information producers. This also depends on how we think of information. We usually define content as information, but the structure and infrastructure are also pieces of 'information' we continuously shape through our interaction with technology. Hence, when we talk about making information accessible, we are also talking about producing legible and intelligible infrastructures.

Linking it back to digital technology

I am aware that the relationship we are trying to draw seems little far-fetched, but Amruth and the Vita Bean's team experience shows this behavioral-science approach, not only has a lot of potential, but is seldom explored in the education technology market. He told us about his success story with a behavior simulation engine. They used neuroscience as a base to build computer based activities and games to predict the behavior of its users on specific situations. They had an accuracy of 86%, which according to Amruth, is larger than every known psychological framework, and according to their testimonial, above most behavioral tests in the market (which only yield 20-40% of accuracy). Amruth said: "That was the first behavior research connection that brought us into the start-up space. Exploring games, exploring human behavior."

Design challenges in
mobile applications**

Make it noticeable
Make it useless if not shared
Manufacture peer pressure
Easy to personalize
Must evolve constantly
(static stories die)

We can also link these ideas back to storytelling. Amruth and I discussed what is the best way to use technology to engage users with digital stories. He made a good point at pairing up both processes: "What makes a storytelling session effective is how you contextualize a story for the person you are sitting with. As kids we are used to a one way process. As adults, stories are more interactive, so you may bring a new dimension, and the story might go in a very different direction. The technology must enable and reflect that." Compelling narratives must motivate the audience to interact with the stories, and digital devices must perform the same function. The infrastructure and interface of technologies must be intuitive, familiar and persuasive enough to sway users into interacting with it.

A way to do this is by pairing up technologies with the criterion above. In terms of functionality: provide them with a mechanism that translates the users ideas into action, that is efficient at enabling them, and that reduces the 'distance (the cost or amount of energy needed) to perform a task -as has been accomplished with Guru G in India. As for the force and direction of motivation, Amruth brought up some design challenges when discussing adoption of mobile applications [**"by analysing what increases the probability of a solution / campaign growing organically by word of mouth, going viral, and specifically what make something fashionable". See box on the left]. These challenges may vary from one application to the other but, at the end of day, the analysis and conceptualization of the product must be persuasive and empathetic with its users.

Making Change

To close our interview, Amruth and I talked about what it means to 'make change' through digital design. He believes 'making change' is composed of three elements:

Empathy: Your attempt to make change will depend on the amount of empathy you feel towards the people you are trying to create change for. "We spend time interacting with teachers, classrooms, just to get an idea of how the teacher thinks, empathize with prospective users".
Imagination: How you translate this empathy into solutions. "Imagination helps you think of as many solutions as you can to solve the design and adoption challenges"
Action: The most challenging stage according to Amruth: "If your technology is too hard to use, you will lose audience. If it's not impactful enough, it is trivialized. How do you reach a balance in making it effortless and yet, impactful?"

This post took a step back in our analysis of citizen action, to uncover a less visible space where change is also taking place: the intersection of the user with the machine. We seldom look at the relationship: producer-machine-consumer (and its multiple combinations) and how our behavior is being reconfigured by new digital technologies (in this project). The pace at which we need to upgrade our own operation systems, requires a degree of digital literacy that is not being facilitated by the state, the market or even civil society. Vita Beans, is one of the few examples of market actors working towards cutting the middle-man between users and digital technologies. If widely adopted, this model has the potential of re-organizing the state-citizen-market dynamic: from how citizens interact with the technology market to how new ways of producing and using technology might shape citizens' negotiation with the state.

This was also a set of explorations. It is a fairly new area in our research that will lead to more conversations with people who understand technology as an infrastructure and as material, as opposed to us- who often understand it as a practice, a space or an actor. Our goal is to bring content and infrastructure closer together, and make a stronger emphasis on inter-disciplinarity and multi-stakeholderism as a strategy to leverage change.

Footnotes:

[1] Refer to Marc Prensky's Digital Native, Digital Immigrant, for more on the limitations of digital immigrants in the education space; "It‟s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language". Access it here: http://bit.ly/IMBu0j

The CIS book : Digital Alternatives with a Cause, is also an interesting and comprehensive read of what comprises a digital native or digital immigrant today: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook

[2] The World Bank makes reference to G.D. Wiebe's thinking on their blog: http://bit.ly/1jNZVZA. Also refer to: Baker, Michael (2012). The Marketing Book. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. p. 696 and Lefebvre, R. Craig. Social Marketing and Social Change: Strategies and Tools to Improve Health, Well-Being and the Environment\year=2013. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 4. for examples of these interventions. Finally, the Wikipedia page on Social Marketing explains the role of G.D. Wiebe in the field: http://bit.ly/1lw4jPV

Sources:

Kotler, P., & Zaltman, G. (1971). Social marketing: an approach to planned social change. Journal of marketing, 35(3).

Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

Wiebe, G.D. (1951-1952). "Merchandising Commodities and Citizenship on Television". Public Opinion Quarterly 15 (Winter): 679.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/digital-storytelling-human-behavior-vs-technology

Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 2

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:30:15Z

This post compares the method of storytelling with performances. To illustrate this, we explore the narratives of the Blank Noise project and The Ugly Indian, two civic groups from Bangalore making interventions in the public space. Part 2 looks at the role of actors and the stage in performances to explore the role of agency and the public space in storytelling.

This is part 2 of our analysis of Blank Noise and The Ugly Indian, two civic groups thriving in Bangalore by making a strategic use of storytelling to intervene in the public space. In the previous post, we explored the mediums and narratives used by these organizations to craft an identity for themselves. This one will look at the impact of this identity on the agency and actions of their volunteers. We will also draw some final conclusions relating the analysis back to the Making Change project.

How to navigate this post:

Section	Performance	Storytelling
Pre-production	Preparing all elements involved in a performance including locations, props, costumes, special effects and visual effects.	Preparing all elements needed to convey the message of the story including: spoken word, text, images, audio, video or other artifacts.
Screenplay	A written work narrating the movements, actions, expressions and dialogues of the characters.	Building a narrative in storytelling
Actors	Actors performing characters in a production.	The relationship between storytelling actors and agency
Stage	Designated space for the performance of productions	The public space as the stage for storytelling
Action!	Cue signifying the start of a performance	When storytelling leads to action

3.actor
ˈaktə/
1. a person portraying a character in [a dramatic or comic] production
2. a participant in an action or process

The cast of a production learns the script from beginning to end; rehearses the lines and internalizes the characters they have been chosen to represent. In the same way actors sustain the narrative of the production while they are on stage, we too act upon the identities we have chosen for ourselves in our day to day (Giddens, 1991). Oggs & Capps call this: constructing agentive identities: “participants assume agentive stances towards present identities, circumstances and futures” (1996; Hull, 2006). Embracing a set of traits and integrating them to the ‘story of the self’ (Gauntlett, 2002; Giddens 1991). This suggests there is a direct relationship between self-identity and agency, that will influence how we conduct ourselves in the public space.

As seen in the last section, The Ugly Indian’s self-ascribed identity frames their speech and action:

The Ugly Indian

We are a group of Ugly Indians who feel strongly about the state of visible filth in our cities.
Our philosophy can be described simply as: Kaam chalu mooh bandh. Stop Talking, Start Doing.
We believe in direct action, with a common-sense problem-solving approach. 
We do not finger-point or blame the system. We aim to make a change from within - 
one that sustains because everyone wants it and is comfortable with it.

This means the online identity of the organization (on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and their website) must be consistent with the offline actions of volunteers in clean drives and TUI inspired activities.

Indira Nagar Rising	Koramangala Rising

TUI Clean Drives (Click to enlarge)
Photos courtesy of The Ugly Indian Facebook Album.
Visit the rest of the album here.

"[Join us] if you think like us, and want to achieve something meaningful in your immediate surroundings."

The Ugly Indian

Given the anonymity of the voices behind the narrative, the ideas and attitudes endorsed by TUI organizers can only remain at the discursive level, and it is TUI volunteers who collectively translate the set of beliefs into action. In other words, volunteers are the agentive extension of the movement, as they use their agency to execute the plan of action designed by the anonymous TUI organizers. The narrative in this case becomes somewhat of a ‘creed’ for responsible civic action, and while most volunteers choose to “stick to the script”, they are not really given the opportunity to explore their own narrative within.

In the case of Blank Noise, if we take another look at its mandate, it is collaborative by definition.

Blank Noise
Blank Noise is a public and participatory arts collective that seeks to
 explore the range of street interactions and recognize 'eve teasing' as
 street sexual harassment/ violence.

The processes to translate the Action Hero identity into action are far more open-ended than in the case of TUI. There is further room for volunteers to interpret what being an Action Hero means to them (as an identity), how they will respond to it (as agents), and how do they fit in the larger context of the Action Hero narrative (in the collective). The role of volunteers is to participate in the construction of a new narrative for the public space, defined by how women feel, what they think and do when they navigate it. It is not conclusive, and each intervention is an invitation for further dialogue.

"Adding agency to the equation gives the actor a purpose and new -revised- conception of the self and aligns its behavior with who he wants to be. "[2]

Blank Noise volunteers take ownership of who they want to be in the public space. Through their testimonials and actions, they do not only draft an identity for themselves, but they create one -or many- for the streets, for women, for men, for sexy, for safety. Stretching out our 'performance' analogy even further, their type of action is what we would deem improvisational theatre: the improvisation and intuition of BN volunteers takes over the dialogue, action and characters, as these are “created collaboratively by the players as [the play] unfolds in present time”[1]

4. stage
steɪdʒ/
a raised floor or platform, typically in a theatre, on which actors, entertainers, or speakers perform.

Finally, the stage. This is the space where actors display these learned identities in front of (or with) members of the audience. While stories are not necessarily presented on a conventional ‘raised floor or platform’, stories are meant to permeate "the stage" of the 'public space'. In spite of what Sartaj Anand told us in his interview: “stories as increasingly personal and local”, in order for them to trigger imagination and public discussion they must also be public and visible. Hannah Arendt posits in Essays for Understanding, that the task of storytelling is to extend the meaning of the actions, symbols and allegories into the public, making them visible to broader audiences and initiating a process of critical thinking among them (Jackson, 2002; Oni, 2012; Arendt, 1994). Hence, the role of storytelling in the public space has two functions:

a) Visibility:

Enhanced visibility is an extremely powerful asset. Narratives produced by activist-oriented storytellers do not only reflect greater autonomy of production, but also enjoy a wider rate of consumption[3] (Vivienne, 2011). From a tech-optimist perspective, multimedia representations of these stories further this visibility, making it also accessible to broader online audiences.

The Ugly Indian in particular thrives on visibility, due to its beautification mission. Its highly visible presence online is used to ratify the work they are doing to erradicate "visible" filth:

"X was a big fan of the Broken Windows Theory – which suggested that if a street looked ugly or neglected, it attracted more anti-social behaviour, while a well-maintained and beautiful street discouraged vandalism and often earned respect from passers-by. [...] Could the ugly Indian’s civic behaviour be a function of the environment and the signals it gives him? If so, could changing the environment change behaviour?" Chapter 7 - Nudge

In the case of Blank Noise, they use online visibility to re-introduce the testimonials collected through their interventions and installations, back into the public space.

Reporting to Remember (2009)

Triggered by the Mangalore pub attack, the report wants to compile a list of incidents involving attacks on/threats to women under the pretext of culture, tradition and religion.

By who:

Political parties
Religious groups
Individuals

2. Nature of attack:

who they attacked
why they attacked
You can also send articles/links explaining that.

3. When: Date

4. Location: Region.

Make a Sign (2009)
Volunteers were welcome to say anything they wanted.

What Blank Noise wants to say:
We are talking of safer cities not feared cities
We are talking of independent women, not paranoid women.
We are talking about collective responsibility- don't tell me to be even more 'cautious'.
We are talking about eve teasing as street sexual harassment and street sexual violence.
We are talking about autonomous women, not just mothers daughters and sisters amidst fathers brothers and sons.

Tales of Love and Lust

The vocabulary project, stems from a need to build a dictionary of 'eve teasing', Blank Noise asked participants to email in to comments and remarks they had heard addressed to them on the street. BN compiled them into an 'eve teasing' vocabulary.

The vocabulary was represented in the form of charts, school-style, simple lettering and graphics, in an attempt to desexualise and remove obscene reference from the terms that are used leerily at us on the streets.

Find the full list of interventions, campaigns and tactics here.

b) Political:

"[Politics is] the space of appearance that comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action, predating and preceding all formal constitutions of the public realm”

Hannah Arendt (1989) [4]

This visibility also re-conceptualizes how we do politics by creating political spaces. Setting up a ground for public discussion creates the opportunity to flesh out our ability to be political (Rawls 1971 in Sen, 2005). Hence, producing and consuming a story with, for and by the public, should constitute a political experience in itself -especially in the context of civic interventions as is the case of both our productions.

However, this does not seem to be the case for TUI. The identity of The Ugly Indian focuses on action; on collecting manpower to fill voids left by the state in waste management. In the words of Nishant Shah, they are aligning their work with needs and systems that have already identified by the state, as opposed to devising new modes of engagement or participation. Having said that, staying away from politics is an intentional mandate, and their focus today is removing all obstacles that stand between the middle class and their action in the public space; even if that includes extricating the group from its political nature. For now, spreading ‘action’ and its ‘visibility’ in the network is a priority. The bigger their beautification spectacle grows, the better.

Blank Noise has a different view of how to engage the middle class [5]. The group has identified the need to talk about ‘sexual harassment’ in public; a conversation that has not been addressed and is continually dismissed by the state. This void is hence being filled with stories and articulations of the communities involved [6],as a mean of resisting the stronger dominating narrative of silence around the issue. As opposed to TUI, the priority of Blank Noise is to reassert our ability to perform our role as active, visible and political agents in the public space; initiating a larger process of social critique in their network [7]

(We interviewed Jasmeen Patheja earlier in the project and discussed Blank Noise's political nature. Read the article here)

5. action! (and conclusions)
ˈakʃ(ə)n/
something done so as to accomplish a purpose.

As per definition, action must be purpose-driven, and throughout the last two posts, we have unpacked how this sense of purpose can be built using storytelling. We explored this looking at its methods, narrative identities, actors and spaces of action.

In the case of both organizations, storytelling was imbued in their organizational identity, the interaction with their volunteers and; the way in which they disseminate information. Expanding on what we said in the first installment on storytelling: its interactive nature makes it a tool for empowerment. The identities created by both organizations resonated so much with their audiences, that volunteers adapted their own identities and actions in the public space to align with them and participate in their initiatives.

The post also brought attention to the challenges of locating the ‘political’ within the spectacle. Storytelling as a mode of engagement is effective: it captures people’s attention and participation. However, it becomes problematic when the story becomes a creed adopted without question, as is the case of The Ugly Indian. The lack of opportunities to craft new arguments in public discussion leads to an equally passive participation to the one the group intended to eradicate. Citizens get involved without making critical connections with the material realities they are working to reverse. The citizen is trapped in the performance of citizen awakening and they are ceasing to articulate new ideas. In the case of Blank Noise, the political precedes the spectacle, but at the end of the day, it still relies on a visible and manageable network to disseminate its narrative and attract new story-lines and actors into the discourse.

On the issue of visibility: at the outset of the project we asked the question: what is it about the spectacle that makes it so enticing, and what can we borrow from it to strengthen political participation? [8]. This post visited the three elements that, according to Shah, makes an event visible: legibility, intelligibility and accessibility[9]; and started to answer some of these questions.

Performance	Storytelling	Visibility
Pre-production	The mediums chosen to tell the story (images, video, text, digital technologies) are used to give clarity to the message.	Legible
Screenplay	Creating (or borrowing narratives) from history and fiction makes stories easy to relate to, better understood and hence, better received by the audience	Intelligible
Actors	Acting out these identities shows the message was understood and internalized by the audience.	Intelligible
Pre-production	Digital technologies are effective at disseminating the story and making it more accessible in the public online space.	Accessible
Stage	Telling the story in the public (online and offline) space makes participation and interaction more likely.	Accessible

Finally, the main role of technology in storytelling is to provide and enhance visibility for stories (from all three fronts). As much as the thought piece criticizes the spectacle hype and suggests we move beyond it, this research is finding it useful to look further into: why visibility is desirable for advocacy and how it can bring new and different stakeholders into the process. At least, it seems to be working for The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise. Their outreach is for the most part online and digital media continues to be their best friend to scale up their visibility, showcase their actions and/or installations and sustain their narratives.

I will not make a conclusive statement on whether we should use storytelling for social change or not. However, understanding the power of stories and learning how to craft consistent narrative structures is -as Ameen Haque, founder of The Storywallahs told me- as fundamental for storytelling, as it is for activism: At the end of the day, "movements need supporters. Supporters need leaders; and leaders need to be good storytellers".

Footnotes:

[1] Based on the Wikipedia Definition of Improvisational Theatre. "Improvisational Theatre, often called improv or impro, is a form of theater where most or all of what is performed is created at the moment it is performed. In its purest form, the dialogue, the action, the story and the characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script." http://bit.ly/1hnByRp

[2] (Oggs & Capps, 1996; Miller, 1995; Hull, 2006).

[3] Refer to Sonja Vivienne's ethnography: Trans Digital Storytelling: Everyday Activism, Mutable Identity and the Problem of Visibility. She puts forward the experience of activists from the LGBT community who used storytelling to reassert, negotiate and in cases, expose their identities.

[4] Find resources to read more on Hannah Arendt's work on narrative and action here: http://stanford.io/1ge7JkX

[5] While the project does seek to collect voices across traditions, cultures, religions, etc; its reliance on digital technologies to crowdsource stories keeps the practice somewhat gentrified and homogenous. Lack of diversity in public discussion is a huge constraint for democracy, but from our conversations with Jasmeen, we understand this is a challenge to be tackled at a later stage of the project

[6] Refer to Nishant Shah's Whose Change is it Anyway?. (Page 29): "only certain kinds of discourses are made possible through technology-mediated citizen action. This discourse is often alienated from specific histories, particular contexts, and the affective articulations of the communities involved. It leads to a gentrification of contemporary politics that discounts anything that does not fit into the quantified and enumerated rubric of citizen action in network societies."

[7] Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher, was a strong proponent of using dialectics to question social structures around class, and stories come across as a way to link issues around power back to our personal experiences Refer to: Shor and Freire, 1987 and Williams, 2003.

[8] Some of the questions we have been exploring in Methods for Social Change: http://bit.ly/OCKrgy

[9] Refer to Nishant Shah's Whose Change is it Anyway?. (

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah (1994) Essays in Understanding Edited with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn. The literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher.

Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hull, Glynda A., and M. Katz. (2006) "Crafting an agentive self: Case studies of digital storytelling." Research in the Teaching of English 41, no. 1: 43.

Jackson, Michael. (2002) The politics of storytelling: Violence, transgression, and intersubjectivity. Vol. 3. Museum Tusculanum Press,

Oni, Peter (2012). "The Cognitive Power of Storytelling: Re-reading Hannah Arendt in a Postmodernist/Africanist Context."

Sen, Amartya. The argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian history, culture and identity. Macmillan, 2005.

Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

Shor, I. and Freire, P. (1987) A pedagogy for liberation:dialogues on transforming education. Bergin & Garvey, New York.

Williams, Lewis, Ronald Labonte, and Mike O’Brien. "Empowering social action through narratives of identity and culture." Health Promotion International 18, no. 1 (2003): 33-40.

Vivienne, Sonja (2011). "Trans Digital Storytelling: Everyday Activism, Mutable Identity and the Problem of Visibility” Gay & Lesbian Issues & Psychology Review 7, no. 1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/storytelling-performance-2