Comicboarding

One of my favorite CHI 2007 papers was one on comicboarding, a participatory design technique that uses panels of comic book stories as a way to engage children in brainstorming. The presentation by Jason Li and Neeman Moraveji (Microsoft Research) was a creative mashup of several HCI activities.

The basic problem is that brainstorming is not easy when it involves kids. Often, the process of assembling participants in such a design activity is fraught with self-selection, as parents and teachers tend to offer up the children most like to respond well to the task. It’s easy for kids to get tired or not respond to the rather abstract creativity needed for brainstorming, so engaging a wide range of children throughout is key to a successful session.

Comicboarding is an attempt to scaffold the brainstorming session with a format, characters and plot relevant to the age and culture of the children. This particular exploration was done in China with seventeen kids who were not likely to respond to participatory design practices. The authors identify three possible configurations of the comicboards as well as a fourth variation—”magic board”—that attempts to lower the barrier to entry even further.

The three variations of comicboards were Dialogue, Panel and Page. With dialogue, the story was complete except for a few missing points of dialogue that the children could supply. Panels were more free-form, bounded by a known start and end point of the story but with complete creative freedom to control what happens in between, both visually and conversationally. The third configuration is page, where the story begins but various sizes of blank panels are provided to permit the kids to complete the story as they wish. These all differ from traditional storyboarding because there is some kind of context given to the children; it isn’t completely free-form and boundless.

Comicboarding is facilitated by two people, one interacting with the child to help propagate the narrative and the other tasked with drawing what the child writes. In their initial study, the authors found that children preferred to give direction to the artist rather than draw the comic action themselves, although that was always an option for the kids. It was empowering to not be limited by artistic ability and see their words transformed into pictures. In comicboarding, even shy children participated (although with more initial hesitation). Expressive kids were very active.

Magic boarding attempted to add a “Wizard of Oz” component to the process by hiding the artist from the child’s sight in the next room. The artist then eavesdrops on the facilitator and the child discussing narrative at a computer. The pictures are then digitized and incorporated into what the child is viewing, so it appears that the computer is “hearing” the story develop and keeping pace by providing new panels.

In testing their ideas, the authors discovered that the panel method—where the start and end of the story are known, but the children are free to dictate everything that happens in the middle—was the most effective, in terms of the number of ideas generated. The magic boarding was not as effective, however. Although they enjoyed the sensation of having their ideas translated (reasonably) instantly onto the computer, the kids in those studies expected the quality of the drawing to be significantly better than the hidden artist could provided, and thus disengaged from the process and generated fewer ideas. It was better to see the artist, or be the artist, as they created the comic story. They didn’t try collaborative comicboarding among groups for fear that the group dynamics would add barriers and inhibit the shy kids, which is exactly what this process is attempting to address.

Comicboarding requires some familiarity with the characters known to the children, which is important not only so the artist can speak and draw in the same narrative language but also to provide a context in which the kids can create. The quality of the artist is probably important, too, since there is an expectation of what these characters should look like. Regardless, this is a great adaptation of design inquiry techniques that aims at being more inclusive in the process of participatory design.