Digital Storytelling, AI and Life Design: Designing futures through innovative pathways to belonging and engagement in higher education

Designing Futures (DF) is an institution-wide initiative at the University of Galway, funded by the Higher Education Authority (2020-2025) to enhance a number of signature priority areas for higher education. These include fostering closer reciprocal partnership with social enterprise and industry; and enhancing student belonging and engagement. One of 22 projects funded nationally, DF focuses on endeavouring to develop the graduate attributes and skills that students will need for the challenging and complex world of today, and tomorrow. Through a number of on-campus innovations, DF is helping to develop student entrepreneurship; research-led learning focused on sustainability and the UN SDGs; and cross-disciplinary learning that brings together faculty and students from across academic subjects and colleges.

A key aspect of the Designing Futures programme is the deployment of a personal and professional development methodology, called Life Design/Design Your Life, which was originally conceptualised and developed at Stanford University (Burnett & Evans, 2016). The central idea of Life Design is that design thinking, its methods and processes, can potentially be used to help us to systematically explore and figure out important questions around career, our interests and talents, and life more generally. While not a panacea for life’s big questions, Life Design can provide a set of useful tools which learners can use to help them to examine and navigate the complexities and nuances of career, academic and personal development. Research on the DF programme at University of Galway has demonstrated positive impact derived from Life Design on students’ engagement and belonging, and their confidence as learners (Hall, Millar & O’Regan, 2024a & 2024b).

Digital storytelling has been used within Designing Futures as a reflective methodology for Life Design, and a core part of the assessment in University of Galway’s bespoke Life Design module, Design Your Life. This session will focus on introducing participants to Life Design and encouraging them to develop a draft script and storyboard for a digital story that supports reflection on an important and identified potential skill(s) they would like to develop or explore further.

During the session, participants will collaboratively develop an outline storyline, drawing on a diverse range of relevant creative source material, potentially including poetry, literature, music, film, etc. The use of AI will also be encouraged, (where participants wish to do so), to support the development of resources that amplify and enhance the narrative of their emerging digital story design.