A Little Book of
Creative Methods
for Social Inquiryand ResearchCommunication

Deborah
LuptonDeborah Lupton
Vitalities Lab
ARC Centre of Excellence for AutomatedDecision-Making and Society
Centre for Social ResearchSocial Policy Research Centre

UNSW Sydney
2024

Suggested citation: Lupton, D. (2024) A Little Book of
Creative Methods for Social Inquiry and ResearchCommunication. Sydney: UNSW and ARC Centre ofExcellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
ISBN: 978-0-6457587-0-2
Funded by UNSW Sydney and the ARC Centre of Excellence
for Automated Decision-Making and Society(CE200100005)

Preface
There is growing interest in using creative
methods, drawing from arts- and design-based
approaches, for social inquiry. These methods
can also be employed for public researchcommunication, translation and engagement
initiatives.
This booklet provides an overview of creative
methods from research projects mycollaborators and I have undertaken recently. I
have found that these methods work well toinspire ideas and feelings among participants.
They can spark new ways of reflecting on theexperiences of everyday life and engaging in
futures thinking. They are also valuable forcommunicating research findings to the public inways they find interesting and accessible.
Each page features one method and an
example of its use. There is a list of publications
from these projects at the back of the booklet
providing many more details for those who
would like to learn more.

CREATIVEWRITING
PROMPTS
Example: Data Feelings &Practices
A series of online workshops invited
participants to generate responses tocreative writing prompts and then discuss
their responses with the group. In each
workshop, a different prompt was used toinspire participants to surface theaffective, agential and relational
dimensions of their personal digitised
information and their everyday
engagements with these data.
Two of these prompts were:

Creative writing
prompts can be used tostimulate feelings, ideas
and imaginaries about
the future.

Faces everywhere: Imagine a near futurein which smart objects and smart
environments constantly scan your face
using facial recognition software. What
are these smart things? How would thistechnology make your life easier? Make
your life harder?
Data after-lives: Write a story imagining
what happens to your data after you die.
What kind of data would you like topreserve for future generations to view oruse? What data do you want to see
destroyed or lost? What kind of life will
your data persona have?

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COLLAGES
Example: AI and ADM for
Health & Wellbeing

Collages are assemblagesof images that are placed
together using materials
such as scissors, card,
paper and glue in
response to a prompt orquestion. They offer a way
for people to express
themselves visually by
combining images.

A public workshop explored how
emerging technologies such as
automated decision-making (ADM) andartificial intelligence (AI) tools are being
designed, understood, and imagined
within contexts of health and wellbeing,
and what better and more inclusive
futures can be developed. We invited
participants to join us in reimagining
healthtech and its futures through making
collages that reflected on the social
contexts of their own technology use, thethings and people that mattered to them,and how they imagined better healthtech designs for the future.

2STORYCOMPLETION
Example: Digital Privacy

The story completion
method is a form ofstorytelling that involvesparticipants writing shortnarratives in response toset prompts. Participants
are given the opening
sentences of a fictional
story written by theresearchers and asked tocomplete the story bynarrating ‘what happens
next’.

3Participants were provided with alink that gave them access to an
online project platform. They werethen guided to respond to the same
four story stems by typing their
responses into open textboxes. The
story stems were configured as away of helping participants toexpress their feelings about digital
privacy and personal data. As wellas asking participants to write
about ‘What happens next?’, we
specifically prompted them todescribe how each character feels
and what they do, so as to elicit
responses about their emotions. Oneof the story stems is given below.
Steve uses a dating app to findpartners. One day, he hears on thenews that hackers have broken into
the app developer’s archives andhave posted many users’ details
online, including their names,profiles and dating histories.
How does Steve feel? What does hedo? What happens next?

ZINES
Example: Future Food inSchoolsA zine (short for‘magazine’) is a handmade and self-publishedmini magazine orpamphlet that istraditionally produced asa form of small-run
creative publication
rather than for masscirculation and profit.
Zines can be used a
research method or forreporting researchfindings.

Using the prompt, ‘If you were the boss offood at your school’, we asked children
what kinds of food they would like tohave at school. We provided materials(images of many kinds of food, plain
paper, glue and coloured pens) for
participants to make a zine
demonstrating their ideas. The young
participants used these materials to
express their ideas and imaginaries
about how the food they consumed orwere offered at school might be
improved to provide better choices forthem as well as reducing waste andsupporting environment-friendly foodprovision.

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POETIC INQUIRYExample: Health Information
Literacies

Poetic inquiry involves
creating poems fromalready existing researchmaterial (e.g., fromparticipant interviews). It
can also be used as aform of autoethnography(the researcher writingreflective poetry on theirown experiences).
Participants can beinvited to write poetry as
well.

5The narrratives that participants created
for a project on health information
literacies were used to create poeticrepresentations. I pulled out phrases fromthe stories to bring together in poetic
form. The selection process was based on
how affectively evocative and vivid I
found phrases written in the stories, andconsidering how they could be combinedto generate a compelling poetic
representation. I mostly retained theoriginal wording from the phrases I
extracted from the stories, but madesome slight edits to some of it, includingsometimes changing the punctuation andtense to make the phrases better fit
together in the poetic format.

AI GENERATEDIMAGES
Example: Post-COVID
Imaginaries
An article published from the ‘Australians’
Experiences of COVID-19' project
reports findings from qualitativeinterviews conducted in each thepandemic years of 2020, 2021 and 2022.
The final questions asked were: ‘What do
you think your way of life will be like once
the COVID crisis has passed? Will it goback to the way it was before – or bedifferent in important ways?’. Continuities
and differences in the imaginaries ofpandemic futures expressed in each ofthese years were identified.

AI image generator
software can be used tomake images as prompts
for research participants
or as ways of visually
portraying key researchfindings. You can also
invite participants tocreate their own images
as part of the research
process.

To represent the findings visually forpresentations and a blog post, I used theAdobe Creative Cloud software withprompts that requested an image in thestyle of a tarot card. I chose this stylebecause tarot cards are often used to
predict the future – and that is exactly
what I was asking my participants to do.

6STORYBOARDS
Example: Designing New
Digital Health Tech

The storyboard methodbuilds on film andtelevision production
techniques as well as
graphic narratives.
Participants are provided
with a storyboard
template with a number ofboxes arrayed in asequence, and asked todraw and write anarrative in the style of a
comic strip. This method
can also be used forcommunicating researchfindings in a fun andaccessible way.

7In a group workshop, participants wereasked to design a new digital healthtechnology and then to complete astoryboard (including eight blank boxes
in sequence and space to write wordsunderneath), outlining how thattechnology might be used in everyday
life. We used this technique to spark andtest ideas about how the imagined
digital health technology would beincorporated into the lives of potential
users. Making this storyboard helped
participants to think through how theirinvented device or app might help
intended users and what its drawbacks
may be.

EXHIBITIONS
Example: The More-thanHuman Wellbeing Exhibition
The More-than-Human Wellbeingexhibition was made with the aim ofoffering learning opportunities for thepublic across age groups and as a formof community research translation. We
drew on images and ideas from medical
history, concepts from more-than-humantheory and findings from our own social
research to engage audiences indifferent and multisensory ways.

Public exhibitions are a
multimodal way ofcommunicating researchfindings to the public. A
range of media can beused for researchtranslation andengagement, including
video displays,interpretation wall panels,
artworks, catalogues andhands-on activities.

The exhibition had two key messages:
First, that people learn about theirbodies and their health with and throughtheir engagements and experiences withboth digital and non-digital sources of
information. Second, in an era ofenvironmental devastation, we wanted toshow that humans should recognise how
closely their health and wellbeing areintertwined with the ecologies of which
they are part. Many of our artworks use
images and materials from the natural
world to demonstrate the connections ofhumans with other animals, plants andfungi.

8DIORAMAS
Example: Wellness Worlds
Sand Tray Dioramas
As part of the More-than-HumanWellbeing exhibition, we offered somehands-on activities, which we called‘sensory experiments’. These activities
were designed to engage visitors increative play and making to inspirereflection on the key themes of theexhibition. Visitors were welcome tointeract with any of these ‘experiments’ intheir own time.

Dioramas are threedimensional scenarios thatcan be made at miniaturescale or much larger, as inmuseum exhibits.

9The Wellness Worlds Sand Tray
Diorama·invited exhibition visitors to use
the provided materials of sand, figurinesand natural materials to create adiorama showing what people and thingsin their everyday life made them feel wellor unwell. ·FILMS
Example: Non-Human
Supports for Autistic People
Our autistic-led research project
involved indepth interviews with autistic
people discussing their support needs,
how they use supports other than people
and what developments they would liketo see in the design of future supports,
whether these are low-tech or high-tech.
We made a short documentary film
about the study. Project lead, MeganRose, together with two participants,
were filmed discussing the supports theyfind most helpful to find comfort, careand connection in their everyday lives.
We commissioned a professional
documentary film company, JOTZ
Productions, to work with us under our
direction to make the film to ensure that
it was of professional quality.

Short films are an
engaging multimodal wayof communicating
research findings to otherresearchers, stakeholder
groups and the generalpublic.

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WALKING
METHODS
Example: Making Microbes
Visible and Knowable

Walking methods involve
people moving around an
environment andresponding to research
prompts to engage theirsensory ways of knowing
and feeling.

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Given they are often not perceptible tothe naked eye, individual microbes(viruses, bacteria, fungi and protozoa)
and their impacts on human andplanetary wellbeing, for both good andill, are difficult to discern. The othersenses, however, can fill the breach. In
this sensory walk, participants wereinvited to use their embodied sensory
capacities to render microbes visible
and knowable. Participants walked
around a university campus with pen andpaper and an air quality monitor andused their embodied sensory capacities(seeing, smelling, touching and listening)
to note down their perceptions. Together,
the group thought through theimplications and possibilities ofcombining the affordances of bodily
senses and technological sensors tovisualise and materialise microbialpresence.

PARTICIPATORYMAPPING
Example: Living with Personal
Data
This project involved conducting a video
tour of participants’ homes as they
showed us the digital technologies that
their family members used andconsidered what types of personal data
were generated by these devices.

Participatory mapping
involves hand-made mapsby participants in
response to prompts.

Following the tour, participants wereasked to draw a map of where thedevices were located throughout theirhome and to detail how data wereshared between the technologies within
and outside the home. We used the maps
as focal points for further discussion.
These maps proved a valuable way ofmaking the digital connections between
home devices and family members moretangible. The maps also sparked
discussions about what personal data
are generated with the use of homedevices and who has access to these
data, including data privacy concerns.

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SPECULATIVEDESIGN
Example: Designing Care
RobotsSpeculative design
approaches draw on andextend traditional design
methods for developing
and prototyping new
objects or services.
Speculative design isfocused on imagining
things that may never beused as a way of thinking
about future possibilities
and surfacing concerns
about the present.

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This workshop involved creative activities
and materials that invited participants toimagine and make new forms of carerobots. Participants were prompted touse the craft materials provided toconstruct novel automated technologies
for care that they would like to see
designed and developed in the future.
They were asked to think about the kindsof devices that they would like to see
designed and developed in the future,
how these robots would cater for humans’
multisensory needs and what other things,living and nonliving, would be part of thesphere of operation of these newdevices.
We deliberately provided materials thatdeparted from the hard metals andplastics from which robots are often
made. To inspire new ways of thinking,we offered brightly coloured, softtextured and malleable materials
instead, such as wool, fabrics, balloons
and pipe cleaners.

PUBLICATIONSLupton, D. (2017) Digital health now and in the future: findings from aparticipatory design stakeholder workshop. Digital Health, 3.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2055207617740018
Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (2019) Reimagining digital health education:
the critical pedagogical and research possibilities of storyboarding.
Health Educational Journal, 78(6), 633-646.
Lupton, D. (2020) The story completion method and more-than-humantheory: finding and using health information. Sage Research Methods
Cases. https://methods.sagepub.com/case/story-completionmethod-more-than-human-theory-health-information
Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2021) Tactics, affects and agencies indigital privacy narratives: a story completion study. Online Information
Review, 45(1), 138-156.
Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Things that matter’: poetic inquiry and more-thanhuman health literacy. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise andHealth, 13(2), 267-282.
Lupton, D. (2021) ‘The internet both reassures and terrifies’: exploring
the more-than-human worlds of health information using the story
completion method. Medical Humanities, 47(1), 68-77.
Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2021) Towards more-than-human digital
data studies: developing research-creation methods. QualitativeResearch, 21(4), 463-480.
Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) The COVID digital homeassemblage: transforming the home into a work space during thecrisis. Convergence, 27(5), 1207-1221.
Southerton, C., Clark, M., Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) The futuresof qualitative research in the COVID-19 era: experimenting withcreative and digital methods. In Matthewman, S. (ed), A Research
Agenda for COVID-19 and Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp.
155-174.
Watson, A., Rose, M., Lupton, D., Flore, Jacinthe and Quilty, E. (2022)
Re-Imagining Care through Arts-Based Methods.
https://apo.org.au/node/320139
Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) Remote fieldwork in homes during theCOVID-19 pandemic: video-call ethnography and map drawing
methods. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2022.2043774
Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) ‘What happens next? Using the story
completion method to surface the affects and materialities of digital
privacy dilemmas. Sociological Research Online, 27(3), 690-706.

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PUBLICATIONSLupton, D. and Watson, A. (2022) Research-creations for speculating about
digitised automation: bringing creative writing prompts and vitalmaterialism into the sociology of futures. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(7), 754-766.
Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2023) The presence andperceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map
drawing method. Visual Studies, 38(3-4), 594-607.
Watson, A., Wozniak-O’Connor, V. and Lupton, D. (2023) Health informationin creative translation: establishing a collaborative project of research andexhibition making. Health Sociology Review, 32(1), 42-59.
Lupton, D., Wozniak-O’Connor, V., Rose, M. and Watson, A. (2023) Morethan-human wellbeing: materialising the relations, affects, and agencies ofhealth, kinship and care. M/C Journal. https://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/2976
Boydell, K. and Lupton, D. (2024) Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic:
documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation anduncertainty. Medical Humanities, 50(1), 52-59.
Lupton, D., Watson, A., and Wozniak-O’Connor, V. (2024) Sensory
engagements with lively data: attuning to the convivialities of more-thanhuman worlds. In Vannini, P. (ed), The Routledge International Handbook ofSensory Ethnography. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 300-311.
Lupton, D., Wozniak-O’Connor, V. and Watson, A. (2024) Arts-based andsensory methods to imagine more-than-human automated futures. In Fors, V.,
Berg, M. and Brodersen, M. (eds), The De Gruyter Handbook of AutomatedFutures. Berlin: De Gruter, pp. 395-412.
Lupton, D., Watson, A. and Wozniak-O’Connor, V. (2024) ‘It’s all about
connecting’: using visual methods to surface the multisensory and morethan-human dimensions of health information. Visual Studies.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2024.2316132

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IMAGE CREDITS
All images are provided by Deborah Lupton, with theexceptions below:
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash (p. 3)
Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash (p. 5)
Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash (p. 11)

RESEARCH
COLLABORATORS
Katherine Boydell, Deana Leahy, Mike Michael, Megan
Rose, Ash Watson, Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor

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