The House of 100 Stories

The House of 100 Stories is a collaborative creative learning activity inspired by Toshio Iwai’s picture book The House with 100 Stories and by the participatory workshop he developed around it, in which participants create individual cardboard houses that are gradually stacked together into a large collective construction. This version extends Iwai’s original idea by introducing digital storytelling and creative coding with OctoStudio.

Each participant builds and decorates a small stackable cardboard house and brings it to life through a digital story created with OctoStudio. Inside every house, a smartphone or tablet becomes a tiny stage or living window, displaying an animation, character, scene, or micro-story created by its maker.

As participants finish their creations, the houses are gradually stacked one on top of another, forming a collective vertical world: a growing tower inhabited by many different characters, stories, places, and imaginations.

The proposal brings together cardboard construction, symbolic play, storytelling, visual art, and creative coding. Digital technology is not treated as a separate layer added at the end, but as another material for imagining and making. Cardboard gives the story a physical place to inhabit, while OctoStudio introduces movement, sound, interaction, and time.

The activity can be adapted to different ages and contexts, from primary and secondary education to teacher education, museums, libraries, and family workshops. It works particularly well with groups because the final construction depends on the contribution of every participant.

From a Small House to a Collective World

The starting point is deliberately simple: What kind of story could live inside a tiny house?

Each participant receives or builds a small stackable cardboard structure. The house can be transformed through drawing, painting, collage, cut-out windows, textures, objects, or other materials. Rather than reproducing a realistic house, participants are encouraged to imagine who or what might inhabit it.

Participants then use OctoStudio to create the digital dimension of their house. They might animate a character, record a voice, create a short dialogue, design a changing landscape, add sounds, or program an interaction using the phone or tablet’s sensors.

The screen becomes a kind of living window between the cardboard construction and the imagined world inside it.

Once the digital project is placed within the physical structure, the house becomes a small hybrid artefact: part sculpture, part theatre, part animation, and part programmable story.

Objectives of the Workshop

• Explore creative coding as a medium for storytelling and personal expression, rather than approaching programming only as a technical exercise.

• Combine physical making and digital creation, discovering how cardboard, drawing, collage, animation, sound, and code can become parts of the same work.

• Encourage imagination and symbolic play by transforming a simple house into a space capable of containing unexpected characters, worlds, and narratives.

• Develop basic ideas related to animation, sequencing, interaction, sound, and sensors through open-ended experimentation with OctoStudio.

• Experience collective creativity, understanding how independent creations can contribute to something larger that no single participant could have made alone.

• Foster aesthetic attention by considering the relationship between the physical house and the digital story displayed within it.

Building the House of 100 Stories: Workshop Phases

Phase 1: Entering the House

Introduce the activity through Toshio Iwai’s The House with 100 Stories, a picture book organised vertically rather than through the conventional horizontal progression of pages. Its many floors form a playful architecture populated by different inhabitants and small narrative worlds.

The central invitation for participants is: If you could add one new floor to an enormous house of stories, what would happen there?

At this point, it is useful to emphasise that there is no need to plan a complete conventional story. A single situation, character, transformation, encounter, image, or atmosphere can already become the seed of a micro-story.

Phase 2: Imagining a Story and a Space

Each participant begins imagining the small world that will inhabit their house.

They can sketch possible characters and environments and think about the relationship between the physical and digital dimensions:

• What can be made with cardboard, paper, paint, or collage?

• What should appear on the screen?

• What could move?

• Could something speak or make a sound?

• Could the story react when the device is moved, tilted, touched, or shaken?

The goal is not to write the story first and illustrate it afterwards. Instead, narrative ideas can emerge through the process of making, drawing, coding, experimenting, and playing with materials.

Phase 3: Building the Physical House

Participants build and decorate their individual cardboard houses.

The structures should be designed so that they can later be stacked safely and so that a phone or tablet can be placed inside or behind an opening. The screen might appear through a large window, a door, or another shape integrated into the design.

Participants can use cardboard, coloured paper, markers, paint, fabric, recycled materials, transparent papers, or found objects to create the physical environment surrounding the screen.

At this stage, the phone or tablet should already be considered part of the composition rather than simply a device that will be inserted afterwards.

Phase 4: Creating the Digital Story with OctoStudio

Using OctoStudio, participants create a short digital piece for their house.

The project can remain extremely simple. A character might move through a room, two creatures might have a short conversation, the weather might change, an object might transform, or a voice might tell a tiny story.

Participants can experiment with photographs of their own drawings and handmade materials instead of relying exclusively on existing digital graphics. This helps preserve a visual relationship between what happens on the screen and the material construction surrounding it.

OctoStudio also makes it possible to introduce interaction through the capabilities of the mobile device. A house might change when someone shakes it, a character might react to movement, or a hidden sound might appear when the screen is touched.

The important question is not “How much code can we add?” but “What does the story need in order to come alive?”

Phase 5: Bringing the House to Life

The phone or tablet is inserted into the cardboard construction and the two layers are tested together.

Participants can now refine the relationship between the screen and the physical house. An animation may need to be repositioned so that a character appears exactly behind a window. Colours might be adjusted to fit the cardboard surroundings. Physical decorations might be added in response to something that emerged while programming.

This process of moving repeatedly between making and coding is an important part of the activity. The physical object influences the digital project, and discoveries made on the screen can lead to changes in the cardboard construction.

Phase 6: Building the Collective Tower

Finally, all the individual houses are brought together.

One by one, they are stacked to create a collective House of 100 Stories. As the tower grows, creations that were conceived independently suddenly become neighbours. Characters, visual styles, sounds, environments, and stories coexist within the same improbable architecture.

This final construction introduces another level of meaning to the workshop. Participants have authorship over their own houses, but nobody has complete authorship over the final work.

The collective tower emerges from the combination of everyone’s contributions.

The group can then explore the completed structure floor by floor, discovering the different digital stories and imagining possible connections between them. Who lives above whom? Could two characters visit one another? What happens between floors? Could several independent micro-stories eventually become part of a larger shared narrative?

Why This Activity Matters

The House of 100 Stories provides a simple framework for exploring an idea that is central to creative learning: individual expression and collective creation do not have to be opposites.

Every participant has considerable freedom to decide what to make, how to decorate their house, and what kind of digital experience to create. Yet from the beginning, everyone knows that their work will eventually become one small part of a larger construction.

The stackable architecture makes this relationship visible. Each house remains recognisably its creator’s own work while simultaneously becoming one floor within a collective world.

The activity also helps blur the conventional separation between art, craft, storytelling, and computing. A piece of cardboard can become an architectural structure; a drawing can become an animated character; a phone can become a window; a few blocks of code can make an imaginary inhabitant respond to someone holding the house.

In this context, creative coding is not presented as an end in itself. It becomes one more expressive material alongside cardboard, drawing, colour, gesture, voice, and imagination.

Origins and Inspiration

The activity is inspired by Japanese media artist and children’s book author Toshio Iwai and his picture book The House with 100 Stories. Iwai also developed a participatory workshop based on the book in which participants constructed individual cardboard floors and gradually stacked them to create an enormous collective house.

I encountered this workshop at the Creative Learning Festival in Milan, where Iwai presented a collaborative version of the activity. His proposal was centred on physical construction, imagination, and the gradual emergence of a shared vertical world.

The House of 100 Stories with OctoStudio builds on that idea by introducing a digital storytelling layer. Each cardboard construction contains a smartphone or tablet running a project created by its participant, turning every floor into a small programmable stage.

I first presented this version of the activity at the XVIII Jornada de Programació i Robòtica Educatives, held at Citilab-Cornellà in Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona).

The resulting tower is therefore not only a house made from many houses, but also a collective architecture of moving images, voices, interactions, characters, and stories.