Flash Fiction Stories
Topic outline
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The method requires participants to flow-write Flash Fiction, i.e., very short Science Fiction stories of 150-300 words, under time pressure, usually 2-5 minutes.
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The term fanfiction or flash fiction appeared in the 1980s when two editors named Robert Shapard and James Thomas popularised and published a collection of flash fiction series or Sudden Fiction less than 2000 words (Sustana, 2015). The time pressure ensures that the writers cannot rationalise about the stories and access, in a process of flow writing, their visionary and creative knowledge (Scharmer, 2001; Ciolfi, L., & Lockley, 2019; Wolf et al., 2022)
Narrative- and fiction-based techniques have indeed been used to engage informants and design participants in developing imagined futures and in considering aspects of technology that might not be immediately apparent or might benefit from more open-ended treatment, such as ethical and value implications (Cheon and Su, 2017). Short fictions have been used as prompts for probing a focus group (Draper and Sorell, 2014), and groups of external participants have been engaged by researchers to create participatory design fictions (Muller and Liao, 2017).
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"The Flash-Fiction-Stories-method is used to enable students to access their visionary knowledge about the far future as a basis for further discussion and the development of scenarios. It follows this procedure:
● The educator sets up creative writing workshops where the students sit in random groups. The use of this method does not require a fact-based introduction to the topic. Still, the topic needs to be clear (for example, that this story writing session is about the endeavours of a person who lives in the year XXXX and their experiences with robots at work)
● This is followed by the assignment to imagine a world in the respective year and environment in which their main character lives, and to write down the name of that protagonist.
● After this, participants engage in three rounds of creative writing sessions for two to five minutes each. For each session, they received a guiding question (for example, first round: describe the environment in which your main character lives, second round: describe a positive experience of your main character, third round: describe a negative experience of your main character)
● Optional: Between the sessions, writers read their stories out at their tables or to all. This spurs inspiration from others.
● In a closing plenary session, the participants had the opportunity to share additional thoughts on the future in the topic area.
Beyond creative writing, flash fiction as a technique has been used in education, for example, to encourage students to write opinion pieces (Setyowati, 2016). The paper “Analyzing the Students’ Ability in Writing Opinion Essay using Flash Fiction” describes how the method can be used in class and gives suggestions to teachers who intend to use this method. First, the educator should select a fiction with words ranging from 500 to less than 1500 words. Second, the fiction should not be complicated in terms of plot. Simple plot will help students to have better comprehension of the story because, after all, fiction is just a tool to learn to write in the target language.
It can also be used with people who are already familiar with science and data regarding the future, (for example climate change) to unpack or scrutinise the way that this science or data is presented in everyday life in popular culture and how that might have an impact.
Some tricks for this method to be more efficient involve sharing the stories at the end of the exercise and inviting students to write by hand.
To extract scenarios from these stories, qualitative content analysis can be used according to Miles et al. (2014) and Saldaña (2016). This requires first coding the transcript openly, creating first-level codes. Then, the meanings of these first-level codes should be discussed and pattern codes created, which groups first-level codes according to their similarity.
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● Cheon, E., & Su, N. M. (2017, February). Configuring the User: " Robots have Needs Too". In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 191-206).
● Ciolfi, L., & Lockley, E. (2019). Exploring flash fiction for the collaborative interpretation of qualitative data. In Proceedings of 17th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).
● Draper, H., & Sorell, T. (2014, October). Using robots to modify demanding or impolite behaviour of older people. In International Conference on Social Robotics (pp. 125-134). Springer, Cham.
● Miles, M.B., Huberman, A.M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis. A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage.
● Muller, M. & Liao, V. (2017). Exploring AI Values and Ethics through Participatory Design Fictions. HCIC 2017: Design Futures. Available online at http://qveraliao.com/hcic2017.pdf
● Saldaña (2016). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). Sage.
● Setyowati, L. (2016). Analysing the students’ ability in writing opinion essay using flash fiction. Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics, 1(1), 79-92.
● Scharmer, C. O., 2001. Self‐transcending knowledge: sensing and organizing around emerging opportunities. Journal of Knowledge Management 5 (2), 137-151.
● Sustana, C. (2015). What Is Flash Fiction?. Retrieved June, 21, 2015.
● Wolf, P., Linden, E., Wittmer, A., & Klotz, U. (2022). Enhancing scenario originality: A conceptual framework for leveraging self-transcending knowledge in scenario development. Long Range Planning.
● How to Write Flash Fiction :
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