RESEARCH
As Muriel Rukeyser´s aphorism suggests, the “world is made out of stories, not atoms” : a human-made bricolage of everyday anecdotes, allegories, news reports, “facts” and fictional accounts assembled with little concern for truth claims or common grounds. Starting from this premise, such a “world” may feel like a fabulous carrousel freed from gravity and price tags, constitutional debates and bills of rights.
In other words: a world without atoms is also a world without laws.
If, however, the world is also made of atoms potentially affecting the fate of millions, the stories we tell and their potential “worlding” effects becomes a matter of serious concern. Without a shared cosmic narrative : no truth or lies, no legitimacy and no accountability, no social contract and no possible collective action.
The creation and maintenance of a consensus reality may then require the telling of a story we can all agree on, - or rather : a story the majority would not reject as false or misleading. A story to manifest values and guide actions, however much these may rely on the scientific method and its debates. How does such a story work? How is it “made”? …and how do stories work at all? If narratives are so central to the way we experience, understand and act in the contemporary world, researching storytelling processes appears to be an obligation.
Where should we 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 more than the “organisation of experience”, it is also a question of experience design . 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 challenges all we think we know as we begin to build a fictional world, or document the lived experience of our neighbours. Storytelling processes can be themselves designed as a transformative experience.
If the practice of Storytelling has so-called transformative qualities, how can these be leveraged to help individuals, communities and organisations to become self-aware, to explore their own realities, and to do things ? In which circumstances can storytelling practices help move, shape or transform the perceptions and perspectives shared by members of an organisation, a community, or a 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 overthrow? Can words and images actually “make this world” in more-than-narrative ways?
Starting from this broad premise, storytelling experiences can be shaped to inform complex societal issues like the urban planning of socio-ecological transformations.
Storytelling as “change agent ”
in organisations and society.
Stories created and circulated by individuals, communities or organisations may report current events, represent history or imagine distant tomorrows for a variety of purposes and from a variety of perspectives. What is their potential during conception, development and dissemination? How should these storytelling processes be harnessed to affect, not only the perception of, but also the actual processes defining present and future social, economic, and environmental realities? What is, in this regard, the influence of future imaginaries on societal debates, and the transformative power of imaginary-making processes?
Which forms of media technologies and affordances affect and condition these processes? Can storytelling actually reframe past, present or future “transformatively”? Can they help shape new attitudes towards what seems to be remote, unreachable or forever set? If stories influence the way human beings think and interact, plan and decide, judge and reward, what role does their form play in the process?
These are some of the many questions motivating research with, on and through storytelling. Can stories be actual change agents, and if: how, in which organisational and societal constructs ?
Current research efforts are concerned with collaborative narrative environments, and how to best plan and build them for a variety of participants engaging with issues of organisational change (a) and urban transformation (b). Developed in groups, these narrative prototypes turn into objects of intense deliberations, deconstructing and reconstructing “worlds” bits by bits, like jigsaw puzzles shifting their “big picture” as they change combinations.
Collaborative storytelling and narrative prototyping workshops provide in this sense a promising potential for organisations to engage with difficult change processes and reframe issues together. Planned and facilitated accordingly, narrative co-design workshops may cast a unique light on their participants´ lived realities, potentially inducing “transformative” experiences altering mindsets and behaviours, structures and hierarchies, resource attribution and short-to-long-term strategies.
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, following 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”).