Storytelling meets emerging tech in Pitt’s Digital Narrative and Interactive Design program

On a soccer pitch carved out of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Sydney Rodriguez found herself on the same playing field as the Waorani people, an indigenous tribe whose largely spoken culture she studied and worked to document as part of Pitt’s Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID) program.

Conversations with the indigenous people of Ecuador usually relied on layers of translation of English to Spanish to Kichwa or simple gestures. But that afternoon, none of it was necessary.

“That’s really how we connected,” said Rodriguez (A&S ’25). “Just on this common ground of ‘we're all here together, playing this game, and none of us can really communicate, but we found a way through this game.’ It was special.”

According to DNID professors and program administrators Dmitriy Babichenko and Jessica FitzPatrick, that experience of authentic connection and shared humanity highlights a core principle of the program: combining storytelling and technology to serve real people.

In the joint program offered by the School of Computing and Information and the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English, students get hands-on experiences assisting communities through a blend of storytelling and technology.

One example is through the Computing Technologies for Cultural Preservation capstone, which sent Rodriguez and her classmates to Ecuador. The course is part of a multiyear initiative to document Ecuadorian Indigenous cultures, particularly languages like Kichwa that are primarily spoken, not written.

As younger generations move away from the area for school or work, intergenerational transfers of knowledge can be lost, said Babichenko, clinical professor in Pitt’s School of Computing and Information.

As part of that effort, Babichenko said the team is now integrating emerging AI tools directly into the preservation process. Students are training a Kichwa language model using the Meta Llama framework so community members can eventually interact with a conversational agent inside the virtual environment — an approach meant to support language engagement rather than replace it.

Their work includes designing accessible tools, like digital platforms that record oral histories and languages not traditionally written down, creating immersive experiences that educate as much as they entertain through technology.

Students and faculty are also using AI to help analyze collected materials. Babichenko said the team relies on the OpenAI API to identify animals, plants, objects, locations, environmental details and semantic concepts across hours of oral histories, making it easier to organize and cross-reference cultural information that previously existed only in spoken form.

Rodriguez, who graduated from the DNID program in the spring, was part of the UX/UI team that developed a website, VR prototype and searchable database for Kichwa narratives and ecological data. She said the hands-on work had a strong impact on her approach to design.

“It really just opened my eyes to making sure that the things that I make are accessible and usable for the audience that I’m designing it for,” Rodriguez said.

As the role of AI expands, the team’s approach is grounded in ethical responsibility. AI is employed only as a supportive tool for tagging, organizing and visualizing stories, not as a replacement for community interpretation or authority, Babichenko said. And, any AI-generated outputs, including translation assistance, undergo community and expert review to ensure cultural accuracy before being incorporated into the system.

He also emphasized that the initiative is designed with the community’s benefit at the center. Students in the program will help youth develop technical skills, creating additional income sources. Additionally, they will help ensure people in the community own intellectual property from data generated through the project.

“The Kichwa and Waorani communities are not research subjects but co-creators and co-curators of their own cultural materials,” Babichenko said.

Beyond the Ecuador project, program director FitzPatrick said DNID encourages students to think critically, creatively and ethically about AI’s expanding role in design, media creation and digital storytelling.

Students are asked to contextualize how AI is reshaping these fields, engage in open discussions about both technical and public perceptions of the technology and gain hands-on experience while also examining AI’s environmental and societal impacts.