Grandparents and Grandchildren Share their Stories in a Digital Tree of Cultural Heritage

This post summarizes the paper “With a hint she will remember”: Collaborative Storytelling and Culture Sharing between Immigrant Grandparents and Grandchildren Via Magic Thing Designs. by Amna Liaqat, Benett Axtell, and Cosmin Munteanu, which has been accepted to CSCW ’22.

A single family story doesn’t stand on its own. When a grandparent tells a family story to a grandchild, that is one part of the long-standing practice of family history and culture exchange; one piece of all the stories crossing generations. For families of immigrants, these stories also need to cross the distance and language differences that can keep generations apart.

We brought together grandparents and grandchildren in families of immigrants to imagine magic solutions to documenting family stories, which they drew together while sharing different stories. In our work, we guide people to create designs for some Magic Thing because that way their ideas won’t be caught up in ideas of what technology can or can’t do today or how they are supposed to use it. Magic is bigger than technology, so magic designs shows us what we need to aim for in the future.

With magic, these families imagined ways to keep all their family stories together, growing and connected to each other. Picture a tree with retellings and new stories branching off from older narrators and generations. Together they created magic wands, teleporters, and story maps.

A time traveling teleporter design (left) and using a magic wand design (right)

These imagined solutions didn’t just preserve the stories themselves (like books on a shelf). Their magic ideas stored the connections between different stories, retellings of the same story, and the different prompts that start a story. We call these prompts hints after a grandparent who told us that “with just a hint” their grandchild can remember that family story.

The magic didn’t stop at stories and hints. They also saved the different narrators, authors, and illustrators of different parts of a story (like a grandparent telling a story while a grandchild draws a picture of what they hear). All of these parts were kept together in the imagined story tools.

While families were drawing their designs, we didn’t need to remind them to share stories. Once one story was started, usually by a grandparent, someone would easily pick up the thread and start telling a new story from there. Stories snowballed from one into the other, sometimes even overlapping. Stories become hints, which become the more stories, and so on. And this matches that tree of stories the families created in their magic designs.

We started this project because immigrant families often miss out on common prompts for family story sharing, like old photographs. We wondered if an app or website could help these generations to connect and prompt stories in some way, like by creating drawings of stories to be prompts like photographs would be. What they showed us is that you only need to prompt that first story. And beyond prompting, families need to save their stories and all that goes with them.

We’re now working towards a digital tool that does something like those magical trees of stories created together by grandparents and grandchildren. Growing from a first hint to a rich family tree will take time. I wonder what those trees will look like with generations of stories and memories shared and reshared across cultures, languages, and generations.