PerFECt: A Performative Framework to Establish and Sustain Onlife Communities and Its Use to Design a Mobile App to Extend a Digital Storytelling Platform with New Capabilities

This paper presents how the concept of virtual community can be further elaborated to account for the use of modern digital technologies in a way that promotes the establishment of rich social contexts within which human creativity is exercised and learning happens. The new reality brought about by digital technologies is characterized by new qualities, new opportunities for action, new community affordances, that are captures by the term onlife. This term was initially proposed in the Onlife Manifesto and used in this paper to signify certain qualities that are important in understanding modern digital platforms and applications as well as guide the efforts for effectively extending to provide new capabilities to their users. Specific design principles are presented exemplified by the presentation of the design of a mobile app addressing creativity and learning in the field of cultural heritage to showcase how these principles are put in action. This mobile app enables the users of an existing digital storytelling platform inspired by traditional Shadow Theatre, develop their own digital puppets in a way that incorporates the creative process of developing traditional shadow theatre puppets. The use of the mobile app is compared to the need to use external image processing tools and the pros and cons of each approach are presented and linked to the design principles initially presented.