Spreading Personal Stories to Youth Around the World
“If stories come to you, care for them, and learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
—Barry Lopez in Crow and Weasel
In the summer of 2008, I was fortunate enough to be selected for the Designmatters Fellowship and spend 4 months working with UNICEF’s Innovation Team in New York City. During my time there, my primary project was a conceptual redesign of the Our Stories Project. (See video of my fellowship as well as my documentation and personal essay »)
Project Description:
The Our Stories Project collects, preserves, and shares young peoples’ stories around the world. Bringing together the collective effort of UNICEF, Google, One Laptop Per Child, and StoryCorps, the Our Stories Project aims to leverage emerging and existing technologies to create a global platform for storytelling. These are the voices of young people everywhere, in all cultures, all languages, at all times. These stories matter because taken together, they enable people to communicate locally but be heard globally.
The project collects audio stories locally and over the website. The primary way these are accessed is through a Google maps mashup organizing stories by the location of their telling: OurStories.org. My proposal was to push the platform to become more accessible to many of the areas of the world that we wanted to hear from most, but where an interactive map is not practical.
I had spent a week visiting with youth journalist organizations in Guyana and Suriname in my previous semester. While I was there I noticed how these groups were excellent at adapting content from emerging technologies into forms that were available locally, often television, radio, and mobile phones.
While organizing stories on a Google map is one great way to do it, why limit the project to one mode of access? Why not stream the stories though and open API, one that allows policy makers, advocates, and designers to tap into this stream and create their own interfaces that are appropriate and accessible to their own audiences?
Kids with high-bandwidth access can browse the Google map, but kids in rural and underdeveloped areas can hear the radio broadcast their local DJ is transmitting—that he downloaded as a podcast. The idea is that there isn’t one right way to make stories accessible, but many right ways, as many right ways as there are listeners. By feeding the stories out in an open manner, they can be adapted in different ways in different places that make the most sense for each local audience.
See the proposal document describing this approach »
I also explored a visual language to compliment this approach. Our team visited the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Laboratory to work with kids to co-design the project. There I noticed toys of basic geometric shapes that each child would assemble in their own unique way to tell their story. I chose tangrams as universal shapes across languages and cultures. The tangrams represent stories that, while universal, can be assembled in ways the vibrantly describe the land from which they came.
