Story I/O returns Saturday, September 26th for a special virtual day of storytelling, design, play and collaboration. This marks the 4th edition of Columbia DSL’s annual prototyping event. Together we will explore the theme of “Digital Literacy in the Age of Misinformation and Deception..” The underlying technology behind deepfakes is rapidly accelerating, which has only exacerbated frittering trust in our institutions and increased polarization. The ability to manipulate video, audio and text is being weaponized to sow deception by seeding alternate narratives of reality. To further compound the issue advances in technology far outpace changes in policymaking and large technology companies find themselves woefully ill equipped even if they wanted to squash large scale mis and disinformation efforts on their platforms.

Story I/O kicks off a new design research initiative from the Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab focused on virtual placemaking and collective sense making. How might we co-create virtual spaces that by design, encourage civil discourse around challenging issues, and help people develop a capacity for collectively identifying misinformation and deception while also providing shared literacy tools that assist communities in identifying what is real or fake?

We’re thrilled to be partnering this year with SIPA, the Andrew Saltzman Institute for War and Peace, Teachers College Creative Technology Program,, Beautiful Seams and Minkowski.

The full agenda and list of special guests will be released after Labor Day. In the meantime we can share that Story I/O will kickoff with a special immersive experience that mixes storytelling and play as a method to explore deepfakes, shallow fakes and bots.

Story I/O is free and has a limit of 100 participants. To secure your spot please apply today and we’ll get back to you on a rolling basis after Labor Day.

Apply here