Engagement & storytelling for social innovation

People and communities, architects and designers, public administrators and others have discovered storytelling. Storytelling simply means telling stories: stories and tales are much more effective at representing meaningful worlds than abstract representations. Using a narrative gives the audience to experience an event empathically, and to translate real or imagined scenarios into a flow of time, giving them an understandable representation. As such, if storytelling is created with audiovisual tools, the degree of effectiveness is higher, because of the image- movement’s ability to describe and represent the depth of an event, an action or a context. And this is the real challenge, since the problem is not so much to make a good video, but ensure that it will become interesting, engaging, appreciated and seen by many people, in short, that it will go viral. What seems to be the driving force is an unconventional creativity that uses simple but catchy language. If the designer is emerging as a cultural mediator, capable of interpreting the needs of communities or individuals, finding solutions that can improve quality of life, it becomes evident the importance of their communicative abilities in terms of both listening and communication skills. An effective message is a message that can elicit a change in the person who receives it. It may be a change of perspective, thought or behaviour. In the field of social innovation, storytelling is assuming an important role as a translator of messages, and also as a catalyst for interests communities can identify with.