Designing Social Support Technologies Through The 'Narrative Tapestry' Storytelling Method

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While this paper focuses on methods for designing support technologies for people living with HIV, the paper also provides a broader contribution to our understanding of social support tools. There is a growing interest in developing technological solutions like online health communities to support individuals with various health conditions (including those that carry negative stigmas like HIV, mental disorders, obesity, among others). We discuss how to develop more sustainable solutions for people with such stigmatized conditions by exploring the changes in people's identity and needs as they learn to cope with the condition. And we highlight the power in participatory design and narratives among research communities who are dealing with difficult topics and hard-to-reach participants. In retrospect, we believe that the researchers together with the participants were able to create a space for design-thinking due to the emotional arc of our narrative method. "We hope that our method and findings will offer others a concrete basis for developing platforms for many stigmatized groups, ultimately leading to a new type of platform that can both nurture individuals across tumultuous upheavals while at the same time addressing the problem of stigma."

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