Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

Media Lab creates Center for Future Storytelling - MIT News Office

I just saw in MIT News that they have founded a new Center focused on storytelling: Media Lab creates Center for Future Storytelling. I've written about storytelling as an integral part of human-computer interaction in the past. As you might expect, I see this development as a move in the right direction.

Here's a taste:

"Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human," said Frank Moss, Media Lab director and holder of the Jerome Wiesner Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences. "It is how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future. But how we tell our stories depends on another uniquely human characteristic -- our ability to invent and harness technology. From the printing press to the Internet, technology has given people new ways to tell their stories, allowing them to reach new levels of creativity and personal fulfillment. The shared vision of the MIT Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios allows us to take the next quantum leap in storytelling, empowering ordinary people to connect in extraordinary ways."

Given everything that's happening in the world of computer graphics generally and information visualization in particular (consider these examples from Mashable), I think a quantum leap is very possible. Moreover, I think storytelling can be easily integrated with other simulation-based technology genres such as the serious games movement to synergize even further. Examples of where this might bear fruit include helping children with cancer manage their pain and isolation, as Carolyn Watters of Dalhousie University has been doing using computer gaming. I hope to find a way to contribute to this trend sometime soon.

This Is Not A Game: Alternate Reality Gaming and its potential for learning

Long-time readers will recall my interest in storytelling as a medium for therapy and clinical research, beginning in early 2006 with a post on Carolyn Watters' work with child cancer patients, and continuing with others, including one on Atari pioneer game designer Chris Crawford's StoryTron platform.  (You can find the whole collection of FutureHIT posts tagged 'storytelling' here.)

Last week I wrote about a CACM article on the emerging discipline of alternate reality gaming. following up on that, I found an article in the FutureLab site by Tash Lee entitled This Is Not A Game: Alternate Reality Gaming and This Is Not A Game: Alternate Reality Gaming and its potential for learning. It's not part of the latest ARG buzz: it was published in July 2006. 

Here's a taste:

It is the job of the game designers, or 'Puppet Masters', to weave the narrative through the different media to create a cohesive story for players. However, it is the players that drive the game forward, through the solving of puzzles closely connected to the plot. Generally puzzles are too complex to be solved alone, and so games are played with the support of an online community that works collaboratively to speculate, share expertise and overcome hurdles.

Storytelling is human nature, so the genre naturally has a number of antecedents; however, the birth of ARG as we know it is widely considered to have been in 2001, with the launch of an online 'wild goose chase' to promote Spielburg's film AI. It started with a credit in its marketing material for 'Sentient Machine Therapist' Jeanine Salla, alongside the actor's names. This anomaly tapped into people's natural curiosity and when they Googled 'Salla' they found her profile at 'Bangalore World University' where she worked - in the year 2142. From here there were countless links to other websites all set in 2142 - all convincing and seemingly 'real'. Those who had fallen down the proverbial 'rabbit hole' were rewarded with the discovery of an elaborate real-time story about a murdered man in which they were now active participants.

Tash is interested in the potential of ARG as a learning medium:

Coping with Asperger's in Second Life: More about Brigadoon

Here's a little more about the Asperger's Syndrome support site in Second Life called Brigadoon, named after the mythical Scots village where life is perfect, but only accessible every 100 years or so. The post is called More about Brigadoon.

Nieman Reports: Goodbye Gutenberg

The Winter 2007 issue of the Nieman Report, from Harvard's Nieman Foundation, is entitled "Goodbye Gutenberg." (Link: Nieman Reports) It's an in-depth analysis of the ways that the Web is transforming print journalism. There's such an abundance of material here, I can't even begin to comment on it intelligently yet, given that I found the link just a few minutes ago.

From what I have gleaned in this first look, the report is incredibly optimistic about the future of the Web as a comprehensive, multi-modal information medium. It is also optimistic about the emerging generation of humans who have never known a world without the level of connectivity the Web provides.  This nascent generation has also never known a time when the evolution of information technology was happening at anything less than what would have been considered blinding speed only a few decades ago. They are and have always been immersed in cutting-edge technologies and expect the technologies to change continuously.

Consider this progression:

• Thirty years ago computers were used for data processing.
• Twenty years ago, they had become word processors and desktop publishing systems.
• Fifteen years ago, they were hosting expensive but accessible media for global communications and electronic communities (remember AOL, CompuServe, and the WELL?).
• Ten years ago, they had morphed into a vehicle for electronic commerce and text-based communication, and anyone who had a knowledge of HTML and a little internetworking savvy could publish her/his own site.
• Five years ago, computers were about instantaneous access to virtually the whole fund of human knowledge via simple query interfaces.

Since that time, computer technology has once again transformed itself, this time into a multimedia social networking and storytelling medium. Moreover, social networking and storytelling are converging. Cameraphones in particular have brought tools for news reporting in multiple media to hundreds of millions if not billions of human beings.

At its best, journalism is a kind of storytelling. It distills events from around the world into stories that can be told to folks who could not witness the events in person. News has been transmitted in story form for a long time, in fact most likely since the dawn of the human race. The Web enables stories from anywhere to be told to others anywhere else in near-real time.

The Web, it turns out, is an ideal storytelling medium:

Before the Web, storytelling was platform specific. Newspapers and magazines focused on text and photos, radio told stories with audio, and television dealt with moving pictures and sounds. Each platform has its tools and specialized skill sets, advantages and disadvantages. The Web forces these platforms to integrate. Today's best media Web sites are multimedia productions combining text, stills, audio and video.

Over time, how will the Web, our first meta-platform, change our media landscape? I suspect our platform distinctions will not be completely eroded -- nor will it lead to a total convergence among them, either -- since, after all, the various platforms relate to sights, sounds and language, which are the primary channels that humans use to communicate. But the Web will likely force television, radio and print journalists to get to know each other better. By bringing these formats together, the Web should facilitate complementary storytelling approaches, something that should enrich the journalistic enterprise.

Although its name is close to that of Sven Birkert's Gutenberg Elegies, Goodbye Gutenberg looks to be its optimistic counterpart -- what the world could be if the full potential of information technology is realized.

Thanks to Social Media blog for the pointer to this report.

Second Life: Recalling the Dark Side of Virtual Reality

The Michigan School of Information's CHI student group mailing list is having a lively discussion about the game Second Life.  Second Life, while presented as entertainment, has a lot to teach authors of "serious games" such as the healthcare games from Carolyn Watters' group  that I wrote about a few months ago in my posts GameTomorrow, 3d Generation User Interfaces, and Serious Gaming Applications in Healthcare. However, there are reasons to proceed with caution. While there are obviously a lot of life-simulation gaming applications that have great potential benefit, the discussion also brought to mind the dark side of Virtual Reality. As in the mythical tale of Pandora's Box, we may be unleashing forces that cannot be controlled or contained once made manifest.

Storytelling and Systems Development

Storytelling is a great way to communicate the essence of an innovative but yet-to-be-built system to its potential non-IT end users. It is used in this fashion by practitioners of contextual design and HCI, for example this page from boxesandarrows. I believe it's not just for end users, though - it is also a great way to communicate the non-technical requirements of a system to its developers.

Storytelling has long been used in community organization and organizational development (for recent examples, see Chris Corrigan's work and the Story At Work site) but it has only recently begun to take hold in the world of software engineering. (BTW, thanks to the crossimpact site and to Google for making me aware of Chris and Story At Work.) I'll write more on this storytelling and its application in clinical research informatics as I get time...