Hi Jeffrey,
I'm thinking that the idea of personal narratives could perhaps be developed further along the lines of "participatory" research and design.
Instead of seeing the introduction of technology as a "top-down" process in which the final details of user adaptations and improvisations are viewed as secondary or tertiary, these user actions could be viewed as essential to the technology. Individual narratives and feedback could be gathered as data that could be analyzed according to interpretive frameworks (that refer to categories from other analyses of plot, of personal or institutional change, etc.). Then the results could be used to actually inform decision making about technologies (and even their design, in the case of software).
This is one possibility of a future direction.
-Norm