Recently, I am reading the book <Narrative Environments and Experience Design>. The book writed by our previous course leader Tricia illustrates a background of our course where I may find the meaning of narrative environment and the method a creating a narrative environment.
I would like to share some contents of the book here, something I feel inspried as a way of taking notes and discussing with the reader who watch my blog.
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- We use space to establish status, power and social relations, in other words, our ‘habitus’, as French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) calls it. Habitus is an influential concept, with a strong spatial dimension (Fogle 2011). Bourdieu describes habitus as learned skills that enable us to function almost unconsciously in our familiar locale through customary behaviour. Bourdieu argues these skills are cultural and class-specific, and we may feel awkward and lost in different circumstances not knowing how to act or what different behaviours, objects and places mean. Bourdieu reinforces Lefebvre’s and Certeau’s understanding that space is not just a neutral given but, once established, material spatial forms and the way they are used act to perpetuate our conventions, divisions, fears, hopes, alliances and allegiances.
- Narrative environments bring these conflicts among different spatial practices to conscious attention in order to emphasise the importance of place as essential to human existence which is intrinsically tied to locality and spatiality. Space and place are fundamentally entangled with our values, desires and ethics, and it is hard to think of any issues that are not in some way played out through space and place.
- The spatial environment is not taken to be an inert backdrop. It acts upon us, through us and among us. Space and place not only embody our culture and traditions; they actively shape our bodies, feelings, aspirations and actions.
- While the design of narrative environments uses some architectural methods, it also applies methods from other design disciplines to shape the way space is enacted, dramatised and lived in order to encompass cultural, social and political factors as well as taking into account inhabitants’ or visitors’ agency.
- The design of narrative environments proposes that everyone experiences the conflict between their place-based subjective worlds and their complex relationships to the conceived spaces that make up globalisation. These conflicts are manifested through the lifeworld. The understanding of lifeworld here differs from that of Husserlian phenomenology which, in its initial formulations, centred on the transcendental ego and a consciousness which bracketed out the everyday. The focus in the design of narrative environments is on the many dimensions of experience to which networked, situated, everyday interaction gives rise.
- Space is not only acts but also, being a material semiotic phenomenon, ' speaks'. Buildings are social objects, describing how buildings, while having a technical function, can also appear secretive and forbidding, oppressive or moving, depending on your point of view.
- Form, light, sound, space, smell and the activities of other people in the space all combine to create mood and atmosphere which can stimulate action, emotion and memory.
- While spatial forms, rhythms and atmospheres implicitly communicate through various material semiotics and peripheral vision and sensing, explicit communication in space tends to be organised around linguistic and graphic semiotic forms. Graphics in the environment help to create messages, communicate stories and contribute to the distinctive voice of a place. The design of narrative environments sees graphic communication not as an imposition on space but as complementary to architecture and spatial design.
- We rely on digital means to decide on choices for mobility, places to meet and things to do. The digital world has an enormous and growing impact on our spatial behaviour. The degree to which the internet, most often discussed as a virtual space, is integrated into situated spatial practice is often underestimated. We pre-visit online which, Traxler (2011) argues, dilutes our sense of the here-and-now. Spatial wandering and exploration are diminished as wayfinding is delegated to locative media (Frith 2015). Nevertheless, digital communications can also overcome socio-spatial conventions that have previously restricted access to, and information about, places.
- Human interactions and the spatial behaviour of others are enormously influential in the way narrative environments communicate.
- We need to expand our attention beyond utilitarian concepts of functional structures that simply exist in static forms, such as ground plans and architectural models. We need to move away from a focus on designing objects, whether that be a frock, a kettle, a building or a public square. We need to consider how these are experienced by people and how those experiences can accumulate to create an experiential arc with transformative narrative qualities.
- Urban planner Kevin Lynch (1960) theorised that we develop mental models of the urban environment in making a case for the perception and legibility of cities based on five key elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. These elements help us to imagine the city, supporting orientation in the city and reinforcing its identity. Drawing on these sources, space and place can be conceived as a trajectory through multiple related spatial experiences. However, a narrative environment is more than just a spatial sequence; it is a triple, integrated unfolding of movement: through space, through time and through story content.
- We construct our identity using narrative. Narrative is constitutive of experience, memory and identity. At the cultural level, narrative also enables a discussion of temporality and history in three respects: the time of the story, the time of the telling and the experiential time of narrative environment as event.
- The goal of narrative environments is to create audience experiences, not just spaces. The notion of dynamic struggle in traditional forms of narrative maps very well onto contested spaces with their multiple human and non-human actors. Second, a change of state in stories, whether that be emotional, intellectual or physical, or all three, maps very well not only onto the changes in the physical space as we walk through it but also onto the changes in the visitor’s or inhabitant’s experience as they move through the space. Third, the production of narrative, as an act of communication, subjectively positions an audience or reader.
- we move beyond technical, functional and aesthetic questions. Narrative, therefore, is not simply a technical tool. It can be used to inform, to raise awareness, to reflect, to prove a point, to prompt empathy, to entertain, but also to assert power, to persuade and to lie. Use of narrative moves design from being solely a problem-solving service to an active engagement with the political, the moral and the ethical dimensions of specific societies.
- Because of the nature of space, visitors or inhabitants will tend to wander and construct their own narrative threads from the overall framing narrative. The visitors to, or inhabitants of narrative environments are not passive receivers but active participants moving, interpreting, speaking and producing their own experience in the space of their imaginations, physical space, social space and across the virtual spaces of digital media. Literary and film narratives have heroes, sometimes called protagonists, with whom we identify. In a conventional narrative, we empathise with the protagonist’s struggle, pain and triumph. This positioning changes in a narrative environment. As we follow the spatial narrative, we not only empathise with a protagonist but we literally become a parallel embodied protagonist in our own story of discovery and identity building.
- People’s response depends upon how semiotically literate they are, the extent and kind of their knowledge, what stories form the basis of their cultural understanding and so on, in other words, the relationship between the world of the story and their cultural repertoire.
- one characteristic of narrative environments is that visitors experientially oscillate to and fro between the ‘now’ and the ‘then’; between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’; and between who they are and who they imaginatively become. The story is evoked and made explicit through text, image, sound and performance in the physical environment. The importance of narrative as a way to bond people to place cannot be underestimated. It is an important theme in cultural geography, ranging from the discussion of foundational myths as a way to institute place to the use of storytelling in establishing urban identity (Tuan 1991), as well as in cultural anthropology (Fischer-Nebmaier 2015).
