Designing Digital Storytelling Workshops for Vulnerable People: A Collaborative Story-weaving Model from the “Pre-story Space”

Digital Storytelling (DST) is a grassroots movement and a workshop-based practice through which people are taught to use digital media to create short video stories, usually about their own lives. Although DST practices are spreading throughout the world, it seems that little attention has been given to the story-generating process. In running several workshops, we presumed that it was difficult for many people to express their experiences and thoughts in a clear, coherent way, and it is important to rethink how they generate their stories. In this paper, we propose a digital storytelling workshop model for vulnerable people that entails establishing key concepts of “the collaborative story generation” from “pre-story space.” First, we examined two game-like workshop methods. One of them was a DST program “Media Conte,” in which participants and facilitators co-created the stories primarily through dialogs and card games. The other was “Photo Karuta,” in which participants were required to take photos and interview others to find new perspectives through fieldworks. Both workshops shared the concept of focusing on pre-story space to generate stories. These workshops were developed and modified through numerous attempts, which were conducted by the methodology of “critical media practice.” At the end of this paper, we depict how the collaborative story-weaving model is developed from the pre-story space and discuss the advantages for vulnerable people using these storytelling methods.