Listening is Believing: Exploring the Value of Sounds in an Audio Drama Board Game for Shaping Technology Futures

Wei-Ming Chung, Rung-Huei Liang

We conducted a qualitative study to explore the felt experiences of players of Once Upon a Future, a storytelling game aimed at encouraging future co-creation. Design fiction or speculative design has been commonly adopted as a novel approach to shaping futuristic experiences. Existing research has primarily focused on the effects of visual rather than audio stimuli in efforts to facilitate imagining. In this study, sound design is shown to play a crucial role in opening imaginative space and in evoking alternative experiences. In this study we took a phenomenological approach and conducted a revisiting interview some time after the storytelling game had ended. The research findings focus on the experiences of participants that were evoked by the audio stimuli and audio fictions captured by a voice recorder, AudioRecap, in Once Upon a Future. We reflect on these experiential accounts and explore the potential value of our sound design for envisioning futures.