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.
democratic stories public opinion participatory design community installation