Simulated Storytelling
Nathan Costello
National College of Art and Design Dublin
Simulated Storytelling is a critical design project exploring how a social robot might carry cultural memory. It is an embodied AI presented as a speculative object: a constructed housing that holds the projection within it. It has a projected face and a synthesised Irish voice, and tells folk tales particular to a place, drawn from real archives. It does not generate stories. It only retells what it has been told, and listens for what has not yet been told. Working through a research-through-design approach, I developed it across multiple iterations, testing each in rural Irish communities and shaping it with them and their storytellers. Drawing on the tradition of the seanchaí, the community storyteller who carries local memory, I ask whether an artificial presence can sustain localised heritage rather than flatten it. It questions the tradition and its conventions, and makes space for new stories to be told.