The overall mission of the Center is to explore the convergence between art and technology—particularly as related to creative expression through story forms—in ways that elevate the human experience.

To achieve this overall goal, storytelling-related activities of the CFS will address a set of macro themes:

• Experience: developing a new narrative language that is a combination of audio, video, and computation, and supporting transmedia, where the story world is accessible across many media forms (e.g., theatrical, broadcast, on-line, mobile, and new forms to be invented)
• Community: building participatory environments in which communities (both pre-existing and dynamically created) can co-create and share their stories in a social and possibly mobile and pervasive manner
• Capture/Craft: developing new devices for capturing performance and the world, and for creating new tools and technologies for designing worlds and the experiences that take place in those worlds
• Creativity/Expression: empowering individuals—from novice to expert—through accessible tool kits, new on-line approaches to mentoring and co-construction, and environments designed to support distribution and sharing; developing tools and techniques to support the balance of control and interaction between storyteller and audience to sustain a high-quality experience
• Engagement/Learning: creating sharing platforms for cross-cultural understanding, supporting learning through engagement with story-based experiences, and enabling mentoring communities that overcome traditional communication barriers
• Forms/Medium: creating a positive engagement for a fragmented audience, developing and extending displays and interaction means, creating intelligent characters both virtual and physical (e.g., robots)