Storywalking as transnational method: from Juteopolis to Sugaropolis

This chapter sets out to formalise a design framework which emerged during the development of Generation ZX(X), which I argue could provide an exciting methodology for re-presenting transnational histories for new audiences. Generation ZX(X) was a hybrid multi-media event which explored how video games can engage with different types of historical data: oral herstories, lived experience, collective memory and audio-video archives. It explored the hidden figures of the video games industry: the women who assembled the ZX Spectrum computers in the Timex factory in Dundee, and the ramifications that this labour had for the city’s development as one of UK’s leading games development and education centres. This design framework is called storywalking and combines walking as an aesthetic, critical, and dramaturgical practice of reading and performing an environment, with designing complex, sensory and story-rich environments for a moving, meaning-making body. Storywalking invites a critical engagement with the site and its remembered and lived past, enlivening the archive and transforming oral histories, lived experience and collective memory into gameplay. The direct use of the framework in the context of charged sites and living memory gestures towards its potential applications in cultural heritage contexts, exploring heritage sites and their transnational stories. This potential is now being explored in ongoing research tracing memories of sugar and transnational histories in Greenock, which will be outlined in this chapter.