Fostering Collaborative Creativity in Learning about Urban Sustainability through Digital Storytelling

In this paper we suggest that there is a rich learning potential in addressing complex and elusive interdisciplinary concepts and issues, such as that of urban sustainability, with the use of learning approaches and digital media that foster collaborative creativity in the design of tangible digital artifacts. We identify such potential in digital storytelling and describe the research design of a small qualitative study we conducted to explore our assumptions. Our research focus was on how collaborative creativity evolved within small groups of University students constructing digital stories on urban sustainability. We treated the digital stories as “improvable boundary objects”, i.e. material entities created, modified and negotiated by participants in their effort to construct joint meaning and understanding on the complex and multifaceted ideas around sustainability in the city. Data collected were analysed in terms of how the groups collaborated to reach their final products, and on the function of improvable boundary objects throughout this process. The digital stories resulting from this endeavour appear diverse in terms of format and in terms of the practices they embed. This, in turn, indicates different functions of improvable objects as triggers for both collaborative learning and creativity in learning about sustainability.