Designing mixed-reality narratives for life routines: a divergence-convergence approach

Primary reasons behind life routines are typically for certain benefits, which often need some time to materialize. Blending routines with analogous stories into mixed-reality narrative experiences helps create new reasons for sticking to the practice. To identify appropriate analogous stories for different routines, this paper suggests a divergence-convergence design process. For divergence, design workshops with initial guidelines generated a collection of story ideas. For convergence, expert participants independently assessed each story idea on perceived causality between routine acts and fictional outcomes, as well as perceived usefulness of the proposed mixed-reality experience for the target group. Findings show that perceived causality and usefulness correlate in the highly-rated and lowly-rated groups of ideas. Interpretive analyses of the representative ideas further provide insights on formulating guidelines for the divergence-convergence process, including accessibility of external knowledge frames for the blend, and alignment between the blended story ending and the primary reason.