design is more than an aesthetic choice; it's a transformative framework that makes digital storytelling accessible and culturally resonant. By blending craft, aesthetic, and form—visual, structural, and interactive creates experiences that connect audiences to the embedded knowledge and lived histories within each story. Expressive computing is an act of digital storytelling, where visuals, structure, and interactions are vessels of cultural meaning. Here, technology itself becomes a bridge, making complex concepts like memory, place, and embodiment feel tangible and relevant. Through design, the digital becomes a medium to encode cultural, historical, and embodied knowledge into every element of a digital storytelling project.

Inquiry Types: Guiding Themes and Questions

Each inquiry type centers around a fundamental theme, engaging students in questions that shape their approach. These inquiries can serve as starting points, helping students select relevant forms that best suit the goals of their projects.

Memory and Presence: How do we make history and cultural memory tangible?

Inquiry Focus: Engage with how memory “haunts” spaces, objects, and stories, exploring concepts like Black geographies, temporality, historical erasure, and resilience.
Forms: Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Sound Studies, Photogrammetry, and Digital Mapping. </aside>

Multivocality and Community Histories: How can we represent diverse voices and collective experiences?

Inquiry Focus: Capture the complexity of collective memory, non-linear histories, and community perspectives, respecting the multiplicity of voices in historical narratives.
Forms: Interactive Storytelling, Digital and Hybrid Bookmaking, Electronic Literature, Sound Studies, and Environmental Humanities. </aside>

Identity and Embodiment: How do we represent cultural identity and embodied knowledge?

Inquiry Focus: Explore how cultural identity and experience are encoded in practices, languages, and material forms, considering ways to make these embodied data present in digital spaces.
Forms: Textile Computing, Computational Poetics, Physical Computing, Crafting & Fiber Arts, and Black Technocultures. </aside>

Ethics and representation: How can we design responsibly and ethically?

Inquiry Focus: Guide students to consider the ethical implications of representation through data curation, engagement, and cultural boundaries, fostering Black DH methods in their storytelling approaches.
Forms: Critical Gaming, Interactive Storytelling, Computational Poetics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). </aside>

Form Categories: Expressive Media and Methodologies

Embodied Knowledge Through Sensory Design

Sensory design creates a bodily, intuitive connection to the content. Each choice—color, texture, font, or interaction—becomes a tool for shaping how audiences feel, react, and remember.

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<aside> 🎨 To add elements to your kit, screenshot or download any image assets and upload below.

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<aside> 🗣️ Storytelling mission / values:

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<aside> 📲 Platforms:

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<aside> 🎥 Content types:

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<aside> 🎯 Tagline:

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<aside> 💪🏾 Goal/call to action statements:

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<aside> 👾 Target audience/digital community:

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<aside> 🫂 Broader digital community:

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<aside> 📚 Creative & intellectual library:

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<aside> 🔑 Keywords:

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Aesthetic inspo

Design Inspiration Board

Windsong Photo Pack.zip

Logo (or logo inspo)

Design Inspiration Board (1)

Aesthetic as Communication

<aside> 🗣️ Color as Emotional and Historical Architecture: Just as words set a tone, colors can convey warmth, seriousness, urgency, or calm. A story on memory might use muted, desaturated tones to evoke nostalgia, while one on resilience could use bold, vibrant colors. Students should think about how color choices create an emotional and Historical architecture that sets up these resonances without needing words. Colors tied to historical or cultural references, such as indigo for textiles or oceanic blues referencing histories of enslavement, help situate viewers within specific narratives.

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Color palette

Brand Colors (1)

<aside> 🗣️ Font and Typography as Visual Voice Fonts are more than legibility; they can convey authority, tradition, or modernity. Choosing a bold, modern sans-serif might reflect present-day, while a serif font might evoke archival or ancestral knowledge, grounding the content in historical past. Encourage students to see font as “voice,” setting a tone that readers intuitively understand. Students should think of font as a tone of voice, able to amplify how information is perceived and felt

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Typography

Audio as a Layered Emotional and Cultural Context

YOU ARE THE VISUALS

Storytelling and Interactivity as Pedagogical Knowledge Production

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