Narrative Environments and Social Innovation

This article introduces and describes an emerging discipline, the design of narrative environments. It suggests that designers of narrative environments are story listeners, story tellers, and that they also enable others to tell and exchange stories in physical spaces. The text argues that the design of spatial narratives offers distinctive kinds of immersive storytelling experiences that differ from watching a narrative on screen, reading a book or watching a play because audiences literally enter and participate in the spatial storyworld. The article concludes by suggesting, and illustrating through an example, that the active, physical participation of audiences in a narrative can lead to novel and resilient forms of co-creation and social innovation