Play, tell stories and break the rules
Academic Spotlight – Professor Dylan Yamada-Rice
"Creating stories is something we all do," saysDylan Yamada-Rice . "Whether we’re eight or 80, and whatever we’re doing, we immerse ourselves in aspects of fact and fiction, of play and seriousness. It gives us a licence to break rules and, ultimately, is an essential part of what makes us human."
Dylan, recently appointed Professor of Immersive Storytelling, has built her career to this point around people's love for stories. Taking in entertainment and education, healthcare and the environment, she has explored how they – and being playful – can have benefits at both an individual and a societal scale. But her own story is, in honesty, something of a meandering one that incorporates a diverse range of cultures, disciplines and experiences.
Growing up in Plymouth, Dylan’s father was a painter whose work inspired her love of storytelling. Her mother was a community worker, and she recalls going along to summer schools and helping to run art workshops, meeting children who had never had the chance to do something as simple as use paint. The work of both parents gave her an early appreciation of art's power to break down boundaries.
But when it came to her academic journey, Dylan set her sights a little further afield. She had developed a passion for martial arts, which, in turn, led to an interest in Japanese culture. It was a world so far removed from what she knew and that was part of the appeal – an opportunity to escape. An undergraduate degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London was followed by postgraduate research into 18th-century Japanese art in Kyoto.
"Going to Japan and studying its culture made me think about difference, and how stories can be told in a variety of ways," Dylan says. "Everything in Japan, starting with the language, is very visual and they have a real appreciation of things that are fantastical and non-violent. Put simply, it gave me an opportunity to think about things in a different way."
Her time in Japan also gave Dylan the chance to expand her work with young people, and – while living in Tokyo – she enrolled on a remote MA in Early Childhood Education. A subsequent PhD, completed at the University of Sheffield, combined her interests in cultural learnings and children's experiences, and that continues to drive the majority of her work to this day.
Over the past decade and more, her research has focused on children's experiences of storytelling, creativity and technology. A sabbatical, followed by seven years working in the games industry, showed her the power they can have in boosting children's understanding of the world, and emphasised the importance of research and innovation which – as she describes it – puts the child first. When it comes to her target age group, usually children aged 12 and under, that is particularly important.
"People often want me to help create a game that encourages children to do something," Dylan says. "What they don't appreciate is that the children might already be doing that thing, or have made the conscious decision they don't want to. Adults may not appreciate that, so talking to children and understanding their perspectives is always the best place to start."
Where Dylan is concerned, and in line with her belief that storytelling permeates all of human life, there are few topics off limits in her research. She was part of a project through which academics and games developers worked alongside eight-to-12-year-olds to design a game where children learned the key principles of tree care and planting. Developed in partnership with tree scientists at the University of Cumbria and the Mersey Forest, the initiative aimed to enhance children's love of the environment, giving them an appreciation of the role they can play in preserving and improving it.
Another project explored how mixed-realities play could prepare children for MRI scans, avoiding the need for them to have a general anaesthetic before the procedure. With the scanners cramped, and the process a long one, some health professionals worry about children's ability to stay still. A game was designed and developed, in collaboration with Dubit and the Sheffield Children's Hospital, so the children understood more about what was about to happen and why and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the results were positive for all involved.
Dubit
Also on the health front, Dylan is supervising a PhD project by Kumi Oda looking at how playful communication might benefit children's experiences of accident and emergency departments.
"If you go into most A&Es, you see a small table with games and books on it," she says. "But that is often very restrictive or inaccessible, an example of there being a recognised need for something without a clear idea of how it could work. What I try and create is something funny and fun, to get children to engage with it and for it to be appropriate."
Increasingly, Dylan's work also extends to children's use of technology more generally. It takes in varied devices and platforms, exploring what children feel represents aspects of society that are both digitally good and digitally bad. Children, she says, go through a period of thinking technology is all good but reach a point where they see its negative aspects too. Her role is to help them engage with, and gain an awareness of, both in a critical manner.
In addition to her own research, Dylan leads the
MA Experience Design
programme. The course aims to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and analogue making. It explores immersion, interaction and storytelling in relation to real-world issues to develop innovative graduates who can work across the creative industries. Or, as Dylan puts it, people who "can take all the boring stuff in life and make it interactive and interesting."
"Students are amazing, constantly with new ideas and imagination," she says. "I always want our conversations to be a two-way thing, to include them in projects that I do. As an example, I'm currently working with some students on a project linked to Devonport 200. As with all my work, I'm very much of the opinion that it should be a collaborative process, and that everything would be better if it was intergenerational. Imagine how that would change the way we think."
There is a lovely circularity to Dylan's career, in that the sparks of inspiration first ignited in Plymouth are now burning bright here once again. Her experiences have, she admits, fostered within her a desire to give something back to the city. But she is also a passionate advocate for the arts more widely. They can be so powerful, she says, but have largely been stripped out of the school curriculum while the creativity they benefit from is being targeted increasingly by AI.
"The arts allow us to critique the world," she says, "If you get kids to not engage creatively, they become another brick in the wall. My mission is to get children, students, everyone to break all the rules and to be mischievous. It's certainly something I do in my lectures, my research, and I encourage it in others at every opportunity. After all, that is what play and storytelling is ultimately all about."
Story Research Group
Stories connect us to ourselves and to others and, in that process, have the power to change the world. Valuing stories as a primary source of understanding requires us to be sensitive to how they are made and shared and the impact this has on our pasts, presents and futures. We need to be good storytellers to create healthy, inspiring, inclusive and sustainable lives for ourselves, others and our environment.
