Hello everyone.
And welcome to DIS 2021.
My name is Giovanni Troiano and together
with Matthew, Riddhi, Fey and Casper, we
want to present to you the paper called "Are
We Now Post-COVID?".
In this paper, we wanted to explore post
COVID futures using a speculative research
method and to do so we gamified the story
completion method.
This work was mainly motivated by two
questions that I'm pretty sure crossed
the mind of everybody, especially when were deep
in the COVID pandemic.
What will a post COVID future look like?
What's it for us in the future after
this pandemic?
And also, when are we post COVID?
And we want it to inquire
when do people think that we arepost COVID?
Are we ever going to be post COVID?
Is there a future for us where we will be rid
of this kind of disease?
When we performed this study, we were still
deep in the pandemic and this questions were
still very much alive in the mind of people.
So that was also a favorable time to
perform this kind of speculative research.
Our work was also motivated by the question
that Peter Dalsgaard and colleagues posed
in HCI, which is ,what can we do right now
as an HCI community, to help advance the
scientific discourse that surrounds COVID?
In that respect, Peter Dalsgaard and
colleagues proposed that we use methods that are
well-known in HCI, such as design fictions,
participatory design, speculative research,
and involve the people with whom we will share
a post COVID future in a shared effort to try
to envision, speculate about, and possibly
reshape the future post COVID that we were
going to leave together.
Here we take up the methodological challenge
proposed by Dalsgaard and colleagues and
combine gamification and story completion method
for a new speculative research method that
we use here to inquire how people speculate
about and socially construct a notion
of post COVID future.
Before we introduce the study to you, we want to
clarify what the concepts "gamification" and "story
completion method" mean.
For those of you in the audience who
might not be familiar with these terms,
gamification's guiding idea is to use elements
of game design in game contexts, products, and
services, to motivate desired behaviors.
This is how gamification has been
defined by Sebastian Deterding in 2012.
On the other hand, the story completion method
is a psychoanalytic method where patients
are asked by therapeutic practitioners to
complete, namely to write stories, based on
existing story stems.
For instance, previously in HCI, papers about
sex robots have been published, where the
authors asked their participants to complete
a story stem about Morgan encountering a
sex robot in the future.
The story stem was very simple.
It was just saying "Morgan is about to
encounter a sex robot, what happens next?".
And the participants had to write the rest
of the story based on this simple story stem.
We embedded five of these story stems in
our gamified story completion method game
called "What's Next?".
To design and develop this game it took
approximately three months and we did
it using the online platform StudyCrafter,
the same platform that we used to
carry out our online speculative research.
In our study, we asked 37 participants to play
the game "What's Next?", and complete five story
stems to speculate about futures post COVID;
participation in the study was voluntary.
57% of our participants were between 25 and
30 years of age.
19% were younger.
While 24% were older, 62% were employed
while 19% were students 5% did not want to
answer this question.
57% of our participants self identify as male,
38% as female, while 5% preferred not to
disclose their gender.
Ethnicity and nationality were heterogeneous,
as the study was performed worldwide.
In "What's Next?", our participants were asked
to speculate about post COVID future through the
perspective of Sal, a gender-less protagonist.
Participants would be presented with
a new scenario and a new story stem to
complete as a day in the life of Sal unfolds.
For instance, participants would be
asked to speculate about what Sal sees out of the
window in a post COVID future while sipping a
coffee in the morning.
Then after that Sal receives a phone call and
then participants would be asked who called Sal
and what is the content of their conversation?
After the phone call, Sal goes outside and
then participants would be asked to describe
what Sal does or sees or hears while outside.
Then Sal goes to a park and receives
a notification on the smartphone and
participants would be asked to describe
what is the content of the notification
that Sal received.
Finally, Sal goes back home and after dinner
decides to write a Facebook post, and
then participants would be asked to describe
what is the content of this Facebook
post that Sal writes.
We analyzed the results of the game using
thematic analysis and found that
participants made sense of futures post COVID
in three main ways.
On the dystopic end, we identified the theme of
meaning-making that we call "everyday chaos".
In this theme, the narrative is an "end
of the world" style narrative, which
describes a broken and recovering world
at the same time.
Although sometimes downplayed, the focus
is on the ruin COVID has left behind.
App notifications, social media technology,
they all play a role in maintaining
this sense of chaos.
Notably, a lot of paranoia and distrust
in the government, borderline conspiracy
theory, characterizes these stories that see
the post COVID future as something very negative.
To the positive or "utopian" end, we found
narratives of reclaiming bond with nature in a
post COVID world that has overcome the pandemic.
These narratives that we call "back to
basics", couch, somewhat in uncertainty and
hesitancy, a hark back to simpler times back to
nature and necessities going back to essential
relationships and a socially enhanced
world facilitated in part by technology.
Resting between these utopian and dystopian
narratives, a theme that we identified in
"business as usual".
In this theme, the stories written by
participants bear a sense of getting back to
normal with COVID that is sometimes (or often)
ignored or downplayed, where getting back
to normal is often negotiated through a new
set of social practices.
For instance, in these stories, the world has
adapted to the "new normal", particularly
through changed working practices, such as
remote working, social distancing, and whatnot,
but in any event, the vibe is the one of
business as usual, no big deal that we have
COVID, life is just going to carry on.
Deliberate ambiguity is a common tactic in story
completion research, in finding how participants
fill in the blanks.
While our deliberate ambiguity of a post
COVID future was meant to give participants
freedom in envisioning such a future, it emerged
as problematic as their stories mostly struggled
with identifying a future, and especially
one that differs
or diverge from the status quo.
These results reflect how difficult it was for our
participants to clearly identify what is meant
by future when confronted with dramatic events
like COVID-19, as well as how far in time this
hypothetical post COVID future may or will be.
Consequently, the stories mostly made sense of
futurist post COVID
as a persistent present, which Savransky
describes as the "impasse of the present" in
speculative research.
And we directly quote him: "the future has
never been more present, yet the present keeps
prolonging itself, insisting with its own
order of continuity, on a time that does not
quite seem to pass".
We don't think that there is a sentence that
fits better than this quote from Savransky,
to describe the vibe of the results of our
speculative research.
While creating the initial gamified
story completion method was relatively
straightforward with StudyCrafter, it took
the research team two months of iteration
to feel satisfied with the final product.
This was because we felt that the gamified story
completion method was never "gamy" enough.
However, to avoid introducing biases,
we were at the same time limited in our
freedom to design engaging in gameplay.
This lesson learned poses an interesting
methodological challenge for researchers who
are interested in replicating, or rather
extending these kind of (speculative) studies,
and we suggest that they continue experimenting
to identify potential design trade-offs
that will balance gamification and social
constructionist research.
Thank you for listening to our presentation and
we hope you will enjoy the rest of DIS 2021.