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The Elasticity of Storytelling: An Unsolved Challenge in HCI Education

Published: 05 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Drawing on our collective experience as educators and preliminary results of an in-progress research study, we explore the complexities of integrating storytelling into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Within the user experience (UX) industry, storytelling is considered essential for collaborating, engaging stakeholders, and shaping professional identities. However, despite that importance, effectively teaching storytelling presents an unsolved educational challenge in HCI. We begin by examining storytelling’s multifaceted and elastic nature in UX practice and how that contributes to the challenge of teaching it, demonstrating key points with quotes and anecdotes from our ongoing research. We then discuss various pedagogical approaches to help students understand good storytelling, practice their storytelling skills, and better appreciate how storytelling can shape their academic and professional success. We hope that by sharing what we are grappling with as we investigate UX storytelling in practice, we can engage the EduCHI community in productive discussions to help us move our collective teaching practices forward.

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  1. The Elasticity of Storytelling: An Unsolved Challenge in HCI Education

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    EduCHI '24: Proceedings of the 6th Annual Symposium on HCI Education
    June 2024
    111 pages
    ISBN:9798400716591
    DOI:10.1145/3658619
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 05 June 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. HCI education
    2. HCI pedagogy
    3. UX industry
    4. design and technology education
    5. storytelling

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    EduCHI '24
    EduCHI '24: 6th Annual Symposium on HCI Education
    June 5 - 7, 2024
    NY, New York, USA

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