Envisioning in participatory design processes for civic sense-making. A collective articulation of a counter-narrative through provotyping fictional worlds

Participatory design (PD) has been considerably broadening the gaze of the design discipline. This produced a huge impact on design processes, boosting the academic dialogue and engaging institutions as well as diverse forms of publics in give together form to the public sphere. Participatory processes can play an important role in reframing issues and reconfiguring behaviours in the common realm, opening the social imagination to boost citizenship awareness. In this paper, the authors investigate the potential role of narratives for PD activities as a key to interpret the cultural heritage and the social ecosystem of an urban settlement. They do so by supporting the development of a diffused capability of envisioning both a better present as well as a better future with and for citizens, leveraging design’s down-to-earth capacity to foresee possibilities for change. The potential of narratives for PD practices is investigated here by means of a situated and cross-disciplinary research project for the city of Ivrea (Italy), which served both to contextualise new ideas as well as to develop new techniques, pursuing the hybridisation of PD processes with storytelling and design fiction, and developing tools borrowed from science fiction, spatial design and narratology.