Pattern: Case Story Workshop

Summary	Engender collaborative reflection among practitioners by a structured process of sharing stories.
Status	alpha	Confidence	3
details...		Group	Planet team

Problem

Schank and Abelson (1977) argue that stories about one's experiences, and the experiences of others, are the fundamental constituents of human memory, knowledge, and social communication. They call for a shift towards a functional view of knowledge, as Schank (1995) explains: “intelligence is really about understanding what has happened well enough to be able to predict when it may happen again” (p. 1). Such knowledge is constructed by indexing narratives of self and others’ experiences, and mapping them to structures already in memory. Bruner (1986; 1990; 1991; 1996) identified narrative as the predominant vernacular form of representing and communicating meaning. Humans use narrative as a means of organizing their experiences and making sense of them. A narrative is always contextualized. It habitually begins with an exposition, which lays out the context: time, location, props and characters. These ideas are supported by recent findings in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology (Mar, 2004; Atance and O’Neill, 2005; Atance and Meltzoff, 2005).

While everyone enjoys a good story, not everyone trusts their ability to tell a good story. People who base their confidence on a professional image often hesitate to share personal stories in public.

When people are induced to share stories, they tend to harness them to three interleaved goals: understanding the world in which they operate, establishing their identity, and identifying methods of problem solving ("where am I, who am I, how do I get where I want?"). In order to establish a productive design-level conversation, we need to subdue the first two and amplify the latter.

Context

Communities engaged in collaborative reflection on their practice, using design patterns as part of their discourse.

This pattern assumes a co-located (on-site) half to full day workshop with 20-30 participants, and with a collaborative authoring system to support a-synchronous contributions before, during and after the workshop.

It can be adapted to smaller or larger groups, and to a shorter time-frame. A cohesive community could also adapt it to a distributed location event using audio-graphic conferencing.

Solution

Establish a case-driven discussion of common problems and solutions in the target domain, by facilitating a Collaborative Reflection Workshop, focused on participants stories of their own experiences. The discussion is instigated by prompting participants to post their case stories in a shared space. It culminates at a workshop, where the scenarios are analysed by groups of 3-6 participants. After the workshop, participants and facilitators revisit the cases, patterns and scenarios which where discussed.

Apply the Collaborative Reflection Workshop structure, adding:

Before the Worksop

Instruct participants to contribute a story from their own experience, using a S.T.A.R.R template:

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Reflections

What did you learn from the experience?

Here is an example of the template as a powerpoint presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/yish/star-case-study-template Provide guidelines for "good stories" Example: http://www.slideshare.net/yish/case-study-how-to-presentation

On the day

Provide guiding questions for the Three hats and reminds me of discussions, such as:

• What is the story about?
• What is it an example of?
• What was successful, what was not so successful?
• What was the critical element of design behind success?
• What was the critical contextual factor?
• When would it fail?

Related Patterns

list other patterns related to this one, under categories such as component, assisting, conflicting, uses this, etc.

Extends:

• Collaborative Reflection Workshop

Used by:

• Participatory Pattern Workshops

Leeds to:

• Pattern Mining Workshop
• Future Scenarios Workshop

Notes, Links and References

Liabilities, potential risks, extensions, expected side-effects

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.