Shaping and Sharing Imagination: Designers and the transformative power of stories

Changes in business and social environments have led society towards a complex landscape in which the relationship between mainstream media and participatory culture is completely changed, with a consequential blurring of boundaries between public and virtual space. As audience media habits are changing, a digital vision of reality is rising, and engagement practices are evolving. Consequently, there is the need for a new design methodology based on different skills working together. It is then necessary to adopt a disruptive approach to overcome the contemporary complexity, assuming storytelling activities, narrative practice and relationships among people as driving force for innovation. The paper describes the cases of Imagine Milan (2009-2012) and Plug Social TV (2013-ongoing), in which we tested listening and expressive tools and communication strategies to activate a dialogue among communities. On the one hand, there is the aim of experiencing audiovisual languages through different narrative formats. On the other hand, we explored the use of stories in a collaborative process, spreading the narrative worlds across different channels. The aim of this paper is to describe our design approach, merging together tools and skills from different areas: communication design strategies as participative methods are linked to codesign actions; branding strategies, coming from the advertising field, as tools for identity development; audiovisual language considered as a cultural interface for listening to reality; transmedia practice as a cultural paradigm able to involve the audience into meaning-making processes; ultimately, social media advocacy is used to build relationships between virtual and real communities.