On Tuesday 8. 9. 2015, we hold a workshop in the Hanko library. Hanko is a beautiful port town in the most southern part of Finland. It was a cloudy and chilly day. There were Katsuaki Tanaka, Rikutaro Manabe, Masako Miyata, Shin Mizukoshi of Japan team and Maarit Kahila-Tani of Finnish team.
The time was from 13:00 to 15:00 of weekday. We were ready for few participants, because even Kallio library of lively Helsinki city, the number of visitors were small. As we expected, very few visitors were in the library. From time to time, there were visitors of senior generations. However, the venue was excellent just in front of the entrance. Different from the condition of Kallio library, there were two round tables and chairs for people to do Telephonoscope in a relaxedly.
Maarit was such a well-experienced researcher that she could introduce almost 70% of all visitors for the Storyplacing workshop. As a result, for two hours, there were 16 messages of Telephonoscope. This number was more than Kallio library. Many librarians and town officers also joined it. One challenge that Japanese team found was Hanko was a bilingual city and many spoke Swedish but Telephonoscope could only spoke in Finnish.
There was also an impressive incident that one senior female person started crying during her storytelling. All of us were moved by the scene. From the first time, Japanese team members had hypotheses that the classical black fixed telephone would afford people the opportunity of personal storytelling, be used as a kind of tool for people’s care. This scene became one realization of them. Also the preparation of tables and chairs mede people to do Telephonoscope more easily. If we made a more personal space such as a public telephone box, the contents of messages might change. It will be one of our future challenges.
Anyhow, it was the most fruitful findings for us that it was possible to make a digital storytelling system and workshop only with voice messages if we could prepare to design some appropriate conditions, and moreover, Telephonoscope had more potential beyond our expectation.
On the contrary, there were no visitors for Comikaruta.
We guessed that posting up a picture in one’s mobile with a text message was not a familiar literacy for the senior generations. The slide shows of Comikarutas on the large screen became just a kind of environmental image that entertained visitors.
We could also find a clear big challenge of Comikaruta. For Finnish people, it is hard for us to explain the karuta card game which is so popular in Japan that everyone promptly understand the way of playing with Comikaruta. It is so natural that there is a fundamental difference between the ideogram such as Hiragana in Japanese and the phonogram such as Finnish characters. People with the phonogram does not need to play a card game like karuta in Japan.
It is another finding that the cultural metaphor of the karuta card game has a clear limitation.
コミかるたについてはもう一つ大切な課題が浮き彫りになりました。
かるたという、日本では誰もが知っている遊び､文化がフィンランドでは伝わらないと言うことです。かるたにすることの意味や面白さがわからない。当然といえば当然の話で、その根底には、アルファベットという表音文字の世界で表意文字の遊びは通じないということがあるのではないかと、水越は現時点で考えています。
コミかるたのメタファーの文化的な限界がはっきりしたということで、これもまた収穫の一つといえます。
Maarit and Sakari Ellonen, supported by Tanaka were successful to connect the Maptionnaire with Telephonoscope. They heard all the messages of Hanko, and found the venues people mentioned in their messages, then pinned the message to the venue on the map of Maptionnaire. In many stories, there were concrete places. We expect to find some tendency if we could collect many massage.
On Friday 4.9. 2015, we hold the first Storyplacing workshop at the Kallio library in the city of Helsinki. There were more than 10 messages collected both on Telephonoscope and Comikaruta for 2 hours from 14:00 to 16:00.
It was still an experimental stage. The team members found it a fruitful one.
2015年9月4日（金）、ヘルシンキ市内カリオ図書館で､初めてのStoryplacing ワークショップを開催しました。テレフォノスコープ（Telephonoscope）、コミかるた（Comikaruta）、それぞれ14時から16時までの2時間で十数のメッセージが集まりました。
今回はまだ実験段階。十分に意味があったと思います。
Because it was really a first workshop, every member was preparing with a tense atmosphere.
Katsuaki Tanaka, Rikutaro Manabe were especially working hard.
初めてのことでみんな緊張しながら準備中。
田中克明さん､真鍋陸太郎さんががんばってます。
Andrea Botero and Petro Poutanen tried hard to invite people and explain the workshop, because all Japanese could not understand Finnish language.
When Japanese tried to speak in English, specially senior people might worry that they should use English for participating the workshop.
Also the venue is a kind of closed room, different from a public open space.
It was a hard workshop.
A Library in a daytime of weekday (Friday!), it seems universal situation that there are not many but some senior people and young elementary school students.
Young people were concentrating on reading and hard for the members to ask.
After 15:00 there were almost nobody probably because many went picking up their kids at daycares.
If the workshop would be held in more late time, situation might be changed.
Shin Mizukoshi had a short trip to go to the bear park to ask people gathering over there.
But little by little people came to the room because the polite facilitations by Andrea and Petro,
We found Telephonoscope was easy to understand and to be interested in, beyond our imagination.
All the members thought it was worth doing.
For the young generation who are familiar with mobile communication, Comikaruta seemed also easy to understand.
It was also significant for us to find some system bugs about switching languages both in the OS and in the browser during the workshop. We could find it because we were in the foreign country.
Ryuichi Nambu in Japan will fix it soon.
