Confronting the Discursive-Material Power of Storyboards: Toward Participatory Storyboarding

Storyboarding is a key method in design research and practice, widely used for ideation, communication, and critique of design prototypes. This article repositions storyboards as critical design artifacts with discursive and material power that mediates expertise and imaginaries of design futures. Drawing from a case study of a participatory speculative design project with Black older adults and youth, I advocate for a participatory turn in storyboarding, demonstrating how it can serve as a generative space for storytelling, collaboration, and learning. By asking how we might redistribute the power to storyboard, I argue that participatory storyboarding opens up new possibilities for rethinking the epistemic, representational, and performative stakes of this practice. I conclude with practical implications for human-computer interaction design research and user experience education, calling for approaching storyboarding as a relational, political, and situated method that can challenge dominant narratives of technology design and expertise.