Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and
with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak
to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole.
Tad Hirsch, Editor
Time Travelers, Flying Heads,
and Second Lives: Designing
Communal Stories
Jason Lewis
Concordia University | jason.lewis@concordia.ca
March + April 2012
interactions
Six years ago, my collaborator,
Skawennati Fragnito, and I set out
to change the world. Our strategy
for achieving this modest goal has
been to combine our longstanding fascination with digital media
technology with the desire to work
with our First Nations communities to tell old stories anew and
develop new stories to take us into
the future. The vehicle for doing all
of this is Aboriginal Territories in
Cyberspace, or Ab TeC, an international research/creation network
of Native and non-Native artists,
academics, activists, and technologists interested in the storytelling
potential of digital media. The
Skins Workshops on Aboriginal
Storytelling and Video Game
Design is one of two main Ab TeC
efforts; the other is Time Traveller™,
a machinima [ 1] series about a his-tory-hopping Mohawk warrior from
the 22nd century.
The two projects share similar
goals but are quite different in their
details. The Skins workshops—as
suggested by the full title—integrate
Aboriginal stories and storytelling
techniques into the video game pro-
duction process. We developed the
project to encourage First Nations
youth to be producers of media, not
just consumers of it. We also want-
ed them to experiment with ways
individuals and communities might
leverage digital media as a tool for
preserving and advancing culture
and languages, and for projecting
a self-determined image out into a
mediasphere awash in stereotypical
portrayals of Native characters. To
date, we have run two major Skins
workshops, one over the course of
an entire academic year and one
as a 14-day intensive workshop.
The workshops produced two
video game prototypes (Otsi:! Rise
of the Kanien`keha:ka Legends and The
Adventure of Skahion:ati—Legend of the
Stone Giants), but more important,
the workshops articulated a frame-
work for remediating old stories into
a new format.
