Applying ethical co-design principles in collaborative storytelling, with Zenaida Beatson and Anna Jackson
Here’s a summary of the session:
Storytelling as a practice
- In this session we explored storytelling as a collaborative and relational practice that plays an essential role in movement building by:
- Generating awareness, understanding and empathy and identifying shared values
- Driving action by creating a vision of the future we’re working towards and a plan to get there
- Enabling personal and collective sensemaking
- Building collective identity.
In breakout rooms we reflected on some of the ways we engage with these storytelling practices, which surfaced some of the challenges people experience when telling stories with community.
Power and agency
We explored power and agency in storytelling and shared a couple of resources that can be useful for examining the power dynamic between Story Caretakers and Story Holders.
Power Over, Power To, Power-With (concepts used in the Powercube framework, which we highlighted in this article for Design Assembly earlier this year).
Shades of co-design - an article by Emma Blomkamp that encourages people to reflect on the kind of participation they’re engaging in.
A point we would have liked to have emphasised more during this session is that organisations should reflect not just on how they do storytelling, but whether they are the right people to do this mahi. We should consider whether the best use of our power might be to lend resources and support to groups who have direct lived experience or are most affected by an issue so that they can lead, rather than inviting them to participate.
Practices and resources to centre lived experience
We shared some practices and frameworks for lived experience storytelling that offer some useful guidelines:
Transformation Ethical Storytelling (T.E.S.T)
This is a framework developed by Australian storytelling and anti-racism group Our Race to create safer spaces for Story Holders to create and share stories on their own terms. The framework was developed to address the issue of organisations and institutions (Story Caretakers) using stories in ways that might be detrimental to Story Holders.
Manawa Ora is a Tikanga tool for lived experience storytellers developed by Mind & Body (Emerge Aotearoa and Mahitahi Trust with lived experience storytellers. This tool is an excellent model for co-creating a process for storytelling with community, and it offers some useful prompts for examining the purpose, intent and desired impacts of the storytelling.
Storytelling for Systems Change is a report by the Centre for Public Impact that offers some useful insights into storytelling with community, and contains some great examples of change-focused storytelling.
In our final breakout room activity, participants share their suggestions for practices that ensure that storytelling is respectful, authentic cand mana-enhancing.
These included:
Supporting participation and free and informed consent by:
- Providing information in alternative formats
- Offering koha for people’s time
- Making it possible for people to bring support or participate with friends
- Giving people a safe way to withdraw consent at any time without repercussion
- Making sure people know how their story will be used, where it will be available.
Safety and sensitivity
- Offering anonymity
- Being careful not to re-traumatise people
- Providing different ways to engage according to people’s preferences or needs
Using power to uplift and support
- Reimbursing collaborators for time an whakaaro
- Taking a strengths-based approach
Co-design and collaboration
- Practising active listening
Integrity
- Ensuring data sovereignty
- Being clear and transparent about use and purpose
- Making sure we share/loop back to the original storyteller with the final ‘product’
- Depending on length, checking in iteratively.
You can find a recording of this session here and the miro board from the session here. Please feel free to share with your colleagues and community.
About Zenaida and Anna
Zenaida is half Filipina, half Pākehā, and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She is a Director and Designer at For Purpose, a campaign and movement building agency and social enterprise. Zenaida’s practice combines visual and collaborative design to understand and engage people in issues that matter.
Anna has explored many paths in her career, but these always seem to lead back to media, storytelling and social impact. She combines elements of strategy, communications and storytelling in her work with For Purpose.
You can read some of Zenaida and Anna’s thoughts on design and power here, in this guest post for Design Assembly.
About For Purpose
We’re a social enterprise that works to amplify and empower the messages of other socially-led organisations. We do this by creating digital tools, strategies and content for organisations we believe are working to achieve positive outcomes for people and the planet.
