Hybrid Writing for Conversational Interfaces’ workshop

On May 24 of this year, Niels ’t Hooft and myself ran a work­shop titled ‘Hybrid Writ­ing for Con­ver­sa­tion­al Inter­faces’ at TU Delft. Our aim was twofold: teach stu­dents about writ­ing char­ac­ters and dia­log, and teach them how to pro­to­type chat interfaces. 

We spent a day with rough­ly thir­ty indus­tri­al design stu­dents alter­nat­ing between bits of the­o­ry, writ­ing exer­cis­es, instruc­tions on how to use Twine (our pro­to­typ­ing tool of choice) and closed out with a small project and a show and tell. 

I was very pleased to see pro­to­types with quite a high lev­el of com­plex­i­ty and sophis­ti­ca­tion at the end of the day. And through­out, I could tell stu­dents were enjoy­ing them­selves writ­ing and build­ing inter­ac­tive conversations.

Here’s a rough out­line of how the work­shop was structured.

  1. After briefly intro­duc­ing our­selves, Niels pre­sent­ed a mini-lec­ture on inter­ac­tive fic­tion. A high­light for me was a two-by-two of the ways in which fic­tion and soft­ware can intersect.

Four types of software-fiction hybrids

  1. I then took over and did a show and tell of the absolute basics of using Twine. Things like cre­at­ing pas­sages, link­ing them, cre­at­ing branch­es and test­ing and pub­lish­ing your story.
  2. The first exer­cise after this was for stu­dents to take what they just learned about Twine and try to cre­ate a very sim­ple inter­ac­tive story.
  3. After a cof­fee break, Niels then pre­sent­ed his sec­ond mini-lec­ture on the very basics of writ­ing. With a par­tic­u­lar focus on writ­ing char­ac­ters and dia­log. This includ­ed a handy cheat­sheet for things to con­sid­er while writing.

A cheatsheet for writing dialog

  1. In our sec­ond exer­cise stu­dents worked in pairs. They first each cre­at­ed a char­ac­ter, which they then described to each oth­er. They then first planned out the struc­ture of an encounter between these two char­ac­ters. And final­ly they col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly wrote the dia­logue for this encounter. They were required to stick to Hol­ly­wood for­mat­ting. Niels and I then did a read­ing of a few (to great amuse­ment of all present) to close out the morn­ing sec­tion of the workshop.
  2. After lunch Niels pre­sent­ed his third and final mini-lec­ture of the day, on con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­faces, rely­ing heav­i­ly on the great work of our friend Alper in his book on the subject.
  3. I then took over for the sec­ond show and tell. Here we ramped up the chal­lenge and intro­duced the Twine Tex­ting Project – a frame­work for pro­to­typ­ing con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­faces in Twine. On GitHub, you can find the starter file I had pre­pared for this section.
  4. The third and final exer­cise of the day was for stu­dents to take what they learned about writ­ing dia­log, and pro­to­typ­ing chat inter­faces, and to build an inter­ac­tive pro­to­type of a con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­face or inter­ac­tive fic­tion in chat for­mat. They could either build off of the dia­log they have cre­at­ed in the pre­vi­ous exer­cise, or start from scratch.
  5. We fin­ished the day with demos, where put the Twine sto­ry on the big screen and as a group chose what options to select. After each demo the cre­ator would open up the Twine file and walk us through how they had built it. It was pret­ty cool to see how many stu­dents had put what they had learned to very cre­ative uses.

Reflect­ing on the work­shop after­wards, we felt the struc­ture was nice­ly bal­anced between the­o­ry and prac­tice. The dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el was such that stu­dents did learn some new things which they could incor­po­rate into future projects, but still built on skills they had already acquired. The choice for Twine worked out well too since it is high­ly acces­si­ble. Non-tech­ni­cal stu­dents man­aged to cre­ate some­thing inter­ac­tive, and more advanced stu­dents could apply what they knew about code to pro­duce more sophis­ti­cat­ed prototypes. 

For future work­shops we did feel we could improve on build­ing a bridge between the writ­ing for inter­ac­tive fic­tion and writ­ing for con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­faces of soft­ware prod­ucts and ser­vices. This would require some adap­ta­tion of the mini lec­tures and a slight­ly dif­fer­ent empha­sis in the exer­cis­es. The key would be to have stu­dents imag­ine exist­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices as char­ac­ters, and to then write dia­log for inter­ac­tions and pro­to­type them. For a future iter­a­tion of the work­shop, this would be worth explor­ing further.

Many thanks to Ianus Keller for invit­ing us to teach this work­shop at IDE Acad­e­my.