A Research Framework for Engineering Location-Based Poetics

Abstract

Technology has always created new opportunities for storytelling, but in the last few decades the rate of change in technology has accelerated enormously, and our technological platforms have become fluid and uncertain. This is a problem because there is a relationship between the affordances and characteristics of the technology, and the poetics of our storytelling using that technology. In essence, different types of technology are good for telling different types of story in different ways, and yet technology is developed without any sense of its embedded poetics, and writers are left to experiment with the results. For example, location-based systems are now common, and there are many apps that experiment with location and storytelling, but the poetics of location-based narratives are poorly understood, and thus have not informed the development of those apps. In this paper we present a research framework, drawing on techniques from participatory design, UX, and Games Design, for exploring how writers can be involved in the process of building new software and as a result co-create both location-based technology and new location-based narrative forms.