RESEARCH

If, as Muriel Rukeyser´s aphorism suggests, the “world is made out of stories, not atoms” , we would live in a human-made bricolage of everyday anecdotes, allegories, news reports, “facts” and fictional accounts assembled with little concern for truth claims or common grounds.

Such a “world” may feel like an anarchic runaway carrousel freed from gravity and price tags, constitutional debates and bills of rights. A world without atoms would also be a world without rules. If, however, the world was also made of atoms and molecules potentially affecting the fate of millions, the “wording” potential of stories would become a matter of survival.

What kind of narrative is an atom? The moment science becomes a story like any other, the hyper-pluralisation of contemporary online cultures becomes both an entertaining wrestling tournament and a threat to social cohesion. If human beings are indeed these storytelling animals owing their extraordinary evolutionary success to cultural transmission, shouldn’t we worry to understand which storytelling practices supported our survival until now, and which ones could secure our most immediate future?

The democratic construction and maintenance of a “consensus reality” may ideally require the telling of stories we all agree on (!), - or rather : stories the majority would not reject as false or misleading. How would such narrative environment work? What kind of practices would they or could they rely on?

If narratives are so central to the way we experience, understand and act in the contemporary world, researching their storytelling processes appears to be an obligation. …Where to start?

Storytelling as experience

The process of storytelling is concerned with assigning roles and causalities in the sequential representation of any depicted situation. It is also concerned with the attribution of voice and agency, and the orchestration of multiple perspectives in shifting actor constellations. Storytelling is then potentially both concerned with the “organisation of experience” and a matter of experience design. Audiovisual stories offer audiences complex experiences triggering emotions and identifications, empathy and repulsion, - they’re inviting interpretations and debates, actions and reactions, commitments and boycotts. Their audiovisual expression goes far beyond any other medium in its capacity to immerse and create emotions.

The process of storytelling is also a deeply immersive experience. It can challenge everything we think we know about ourselves and the world. When we start to build a fictional world, or document the lived experience of our neighbours, we open our minds and hearts to rediscover what seemed to be have become invisible or forever established. This can happen “just like that” in the course of a spontaneous interaction. Or this can be organised, structured, planned, facilitated.

Storytelling processes can be designed to foster transformative experiences. If the practice of Storytelling has so-called transformative qualities, how can these be leveraged to help individuals, communities and organisations re-explore their own realities ? In which circumstances can storytelling practices help move, shape or transform the perceptions and perspectives shared by members of any given organisation, community, or society ?

How can these practices help people change the way they see each other and their entanglements in systems they may be willing to change, improve, or revolutionise?

The methodologies discussed here attempt to make use of narrative multi-perspectivity to shift points of view, identify perceptual gaps and facilitate debates and negotiations between actors diversely involved in a variety of stagnant situations or difficult change processes. Originally developed to manage the complexity of large screenwriting projects, the creative methods discussed here have been applied to real world situations, and propose simple tools helping to weave and unweave different points-of-views in larger multidimensional maps.

Moving past the single-authorship process to build collaborative creative environments enabling and tracking multiple and simultaneous inputs on similar or correlated threads, the methods prototyped in these research projects seek to register and connect the implications any change may have on the “whole system” when a part is affected. This collaborative storytelling approach relies on a series of steps to be followed during meticulously prepared workshops leading to narrative and dramaturgical maps usable by all.

This narrative mapping approach can thus provide an experiential access to multiple individual or organisational perspectives to generate fluid scenarios or narrative prototypes revealing and possibly re-organizing interactions between actors and systems, inducing distance or empathy, and potentially reframing the appreciation of their mutual contexts, circumstances and implications. They can be mixed with a variety of existing practices generally associated with speculative design and design fiction, but take different departure points and follo different routes to generate different kinds of outcomes.

Those nuances are principally dealing with the workshops focus and the kind of participants dynamics needed to achieve fruitful consultation or engagement. Workshops are conceived as collaborative interactions structured a series of chaptered interactions with varying focus. The introduction of educational material (or scientific evidence) is carefully timed to facilitate the necessary learning preparing the speculative exercises necessitating a certain degree of literacy.

The workshop structures also track iteration loops during abductive processes, which will be detailed in an upcoming open-access publication.

The research projects presented here start with “Dramapping”, a prototypal storytelling environment developed for large screen-based narrative projects, and two collaborative research projects realised for the UdK and the Climate Change Center in 2022 & 2023 with multiple research partners (“gap mapping” and “transforming with communication”).