Fictional, Interactive Narrative as a Foundation to Talk about Racism
Hillary Carey, Alexandra To, Jessica Hammer, Geoff Kaufman
Abstract
As a means of exploring the design space for supporting individuals who have had personal experiences with racism, we developed a Participatory Design (PD) method, Foundational Fiction, that addresses some unique concerns with using traditional PD to explore deeply sensitive topics. Challenging the assumption that PD must begin with a solicitation of participants' real lived experiences, we instead created a fictional interactive narrative for participants to work from. In the preliminary analysis, we observe that the use of a shared fiction relieved participants of the requirement to disclose very personal experiences, but nonetheless established a group understanding of what makes racist experiences difficult and supported a generative conversation about how technology might ease these situations.