Stories That Click: Digifiction as Multimodal Literary Meaning-Making Through Creative Agency, Interactivity, and Scaffolding

This study reconceptualized digifiction as a multimodal and interactive form of literary meaning-making situated within contemporary shifts toward multiliteracies, participatory culture, and digitally mediated learning. Rather than functioning primarily as a technological activity, digifiction emerged as a recursive literary environment where creativity, cognition, interactivity, and interpretation converge through multimodal engagement. Guided by Design Thinking and Cognitive Load Theory as complementary sensitizing frameworks, the inquiry employed transcendental phenomenology to examine the lived experiences of five Grade 11 students, five Grade 12 students, and one collaborating UCSP teacher engaged in digifiction creation and implementation. Data were generated through focus group discussions, interviews, and artifact analysis, and analyzed using phenomenological reduction, thematic clustering, triangulation, and audit trail procedures. Findings revealed that participants experienced digifiction as a recursive process in which engagement emerged through emotion, experimentation, challenge, and fulfillment, transforming learners from passive media users into active multimodal creators. Creativity unfolded through the orchestration of visuals, sound, branching narratives, navigation systems, and interactive design, while collaboration functioned as distributed cognition and shared creative agency. Scaffolding enabled learners to manage cognitive complexity productively, revealing iteration not merely as procedural revision but as recursive experiential meaning-making that extends Design Thinking toward recursive experience design. Collectively, the findings position digifiction as a scaffolded, participatory, and interpretive literary practice that advances multimodal literacy, phenomenological educational inquiry, curriculum innovation, and contemporary Philippine literature pedagogy.