Designing public spaces for democratic stories

We argue that civic discourse can also be public storytelling and propose three reasons to consider this relationship: stories’ relational nature – their ability to represent uniquely human perspectives and emotions – may ameliorate aspects of citizens’ disinterest in civic life; the ability of stories to represent both individual perspectives and cultural norms may offer a form of public opinion that is relevant on both personal and collective scales; and the inherent transparency of familiar narrative forms may offer new ways to explicate unfamiliar aspects civic discourse. We propose a relationship between civic discourse and public storytelling and review one system called TexTales in relation to a developing model of “democratic stories.” Author Keywords Public opinion, democratic stories, participatory design, community installation. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems; H.5.2 User Interfaces; H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: MM
• Authors: Mike Ananny, Carol Strohecker
• Keywords: Aspects Civic Discourse, Civic Discourse, MM 2004, Public Storytelling