Designing Your Reality: 10 Years of the Digital Storytelling Lab

The School of the Arts's Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL) recently hosted two immersive experiences which invited participants to explore how emerging technologies intersect with storytelling, community, and our collective imagination. Democracy in Flux, hosted on October 21, 2024 at Lincoln Center, and Playable Futures, hosted on October 22, 2024 in Low Library, were both led by the Director of the DSL, Professor of Professional Practice Lance Weiler—an acclaimed storyteller and innovator in digital art—and were designed to provoke reflection on how the future might shape and be shaped by the stories we tell.

Weiler opened the events by reframing technology as a medium that fosters connection rather than division. “New technologies can feel intimidating,” Weiler noted. “But here, we think of technology as a tool to tell collective stories in a way that fosters community.” His introduction set the tone for two evenings of collaborative exercises that merged creative inquiry with playful experimentation. 

Designed as a media lab harnessing the arts, humanities, and emergent technology, the Digital Storytelling Lab seeks to tackle some of the world's impossible problems through collaboration, creativity, community, experimentation, exploration, and playfulness. 

According to Weiler, “the mission of the DSL is rooted in this idea of exploring new forms and functions of storytelling and emergent technologies for learning, healing, mobilization, policy change and entertainment. We constantly try to ideate on how we can design spaces that will bring students together, allow them to be present with each other and enable co-creation, storytelling in community. We focus on building these experiential learning environments where people can come and the space can allow for a degree of creativity and exploration. The best way to tell what the DSL does, really, is just to come and experience it.” 

Democracy as a Creative Act: Reimagining Civic Engagement with the Digital Storytelling Lab

The DSL's Democracy in Flux event was inspired by the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s. Initiated by George Maciunas, Fluxus is an anti-art movement which challenges the traditional notions and embedded hierarchy in art making and instead invites the audience to participate in the art making process. It is a movement which took art to the streets and declared that anybody was able to make art. 

It's in this spirit of collective, participatory art-making that Weiler challenged the group to  "think of democracy as a creative act. How might we reimagine the future of democratic systems through playful rituals that transform participants' frustration with bureaucracy into creative reengagement?” 

We were instructed to close our eyes and blurt out any bureaucratic frustrations we had with democracy. Participants immediately began calling out: 

“Access to medicine”

“Immigration”

“Identification”

“Having to call the police for mental health services”

Once we identified our grievances, Weiler introduced our next task: to take these grievances and transform them into absurd, interactive art experiences called 'Democracy Flux Kits.' Our goal in creating these "kits" was to invite participants to engage playfully with the most frustrating aspects of our systems, and ultimately realize that those systems can be revisited and redesigned—they aren't as rigid as they seem. 

One group suggested an "Identification Lip Print"—with a lipstick, participants would imprint their lip shapes onto a card. These cards would then be shuffled and each person would have to recognize which imprint was theirs, highlighting the absurdity of identification in democratic systems. Another group came up with "The Printer of Tears"—a printer installed on a ceiling, which churns out endless pages while making increasingly loud and depressive sounds. As the pages drop onto the floor, the viewer is given an umbrella as protection and tasked with finding a form named 4105 that they never manage to find (because it doesn't exist). 

By the close of the session, the room was buzzing with ideas. The absurdity of the Democracy Flux Kit ushered in a surprising mental clarity for all of us. As we laughed about the absurdity and frustrations of our current legal systems, we also became co-creators in a shared evolving vision of what democracy could be instead. 

Playable Futures in a Changing World

For those who are unfamiliar with the Digital Storytelling Lab, it can be easy to assume that the work of the lab is focused solely on digital technology and its integration into the art world. Weiler emphasizes that the DSL is actually focused on human experience and the importance of play.  

"Technology is integrated in interesting ways," said Weiler, "but it usually comes from the act of being in an environment where people are allowed to be playful. How are we igniting people’s imaginations? How are we helping people feel connected in a time of polarization? Ultimately what the lab does is rekindle that spark of what it's like to be childlike in a certain way, and to recognize the value of play within learning.”

The DSL's Playable Futures event—which took place just one night after the Democracy in Flux event challenged participants to reframe the polarizing concept of democracy in new, more flexible ways—invited Columbia students to bring play and creativity into a discussion that is often filled with fear and uncertainty: what will our future look like? Just as a historian may examine artifacts from the past to understand what life looked like then, how might we create "artifacts" for a variety of different, possible futures to help us imagine what life might look like many years from now?

After breaking into groups of four, participants were asked to reflect on a guiding prompt: “What excites and scares you about the future?” 

For one of the participants, technology itself felt both exciting and scary. She expressed excitement about the new forms technology could take and the time it can give back to us; but she also expressed worry about how transactional our interactions are becoming because of it. “I'm so reliant on my phone to keep up with my friends’ lives, I hardly meet them anymore,” she said. Our group also spoke about climate change and how ill-equipped our society is to deal with the damage that it could lead to. 

Once we examined our imagined futures and the related excitements and fears, Weiler asked the groups to imagine "artifacts" from their imagined futures and use Play Doh to bring those artifacts to life.

Laughter and animated discussions filled the room as everyone—from professors, to students, to staff—began shaping Play Doh with eager intensity, using this child's toy to represent their speculative futures through artifacts like climate-adaptive clothing and monuments commemorating the loss of physical interaction in a highly digitized future. 

My group focused their work on the theme of memory. One participant made a brain connected to a USB drive for a time when we wouldn’t have bodies and would have to rely on technology to go back to a memory and feel something. Another member made a window that was a time portal you could use to visit your ancestors across space and time. As for me, I settled on a small round dish that my mother uses to make rotis. Imagining the future, I wondered if, someday, everyday objects like these would become relics of the past—forgotten and tucked away with no one to remember their purpose. But for now, my small creation stood here, honored in this beautiful hall and remembered by a new community I’d just discovered.

In creating these artifacts, we realized that the future could hold as much excitement and as little fear as we wanted it to, and that we could be active participants in molding our futures. Allowing ourselves to be playful and creative while working through a weighty and often stressful question helped clarify that there is room for playfulness and creativity in how we approach the future and our place in it. 

Ultimately, the goal of both these events—and the Digital Storytelling Lab as a whole—was to create a space for people to "push a pause button and slow think." 

“My hope is for more people to discover what the Lab is, because it's a lab without walls for a reason," said Weiler. "I hope that it can continue to experiment with pedagogy in the ways we think about emergent technologies and enable us to shape it before it solely shapes us. Design can open up people’s minds and allow them to become architects of their own futures in a way that's pervasive and almost infectious."

In the 10 years since its inception, the Digital Storytelling Lab has been not only a place of playful speculation, creativity, and collaboration, but also a reminder of hope and agency in a world that can often feel uncertain. The Lab has helped us tell new stories in unexpected ways—and we can't wait to see what's in store for the future.