Join designer Nathan Costello for a talk on Simulated Storytelling, a critical design project reimagining the Irish storyteller as a social robot, followed by a live storytelling session with the robot itself.
Simulated Storytelling is a critical design project that challenges how AI gets designed, and who it gets designed with. Most AI is built far from the places it ends up in. This project takes the opposite approach. Using research through design, it was developed in collaboration with the community of Camp on the Dingle Peninsula, through fieldwork and staged storytelling sessions with local residents, a traditional musician and a practising seanchaí.
The result is a social robot that holds and tells stories from the peninsula. Rather than another assistant on a screen, it is a situated, physical presence that people sit with, borrowing the role of the seanchaí, the traditional storyteller of rural Ireland.
In this talk, Nathan walks through the research and development behind the project, from those first conversations in Camp to the design of the robot’s face, voice and body. Afterwards, visitors can take part in a live storytelling session. Press a single button to begin a conversation, hear a story from its archive, and leave one in return. Stories left with the robot become part of a growing archive.
The project asks what AI could become when communities help shape it from the start.
Reflecting the Theme: Fáilte Future Europe
Simulated Storytelling asks: through the design and deployment of an embodied AI storytelling artefact in rural Kerry, what can be learned about the conditions under which technology might participate in, rather than displace, a living oral tradition? Fáilte sits at the heart of that question. The seanchaí tradition was built on welcome, with stories told in homes where anyone could walk in. The project carries that spirit into how AI is designed.
Instead of building technology elsewhere and dropping it into a community, it was shaped with the people of Camp so that the robot would be something they chose to welcome. As Ireland holds the Presidency of the Council of the EU and Europe works out how AI fits into everyday and cultural life, the project offers a different model: technology built with a specific place and its people, one that strengthens a living culture rather than replacing it. It points toward an inclusive and resilient European future for AI, rooted in local heritage and shaped by the communities it serves.
Wheelchair Accessible • Suitable for All Ages
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Irish Design Week 2026
