Design Narratives and Social Narratives for Community Empowerment

Considering Design as a set of practices that impact on the environment in which we lead our everyday activities, we assume that enacted narratives grounded on transmedia practices (formats based on audiovisual contents about communities and keeping with their surroundings) are able to support innovations stemming from local communities, as they constitute the most basic form of social life (Czarniawska, 2004). By presenting the case study of Plug Social TV, through which we experienced audio-visual languages and products in a collaborative process, we wish to discuss participatory design practices and storytelling both as opportunities for identity building and community engagement, and tools that can lead, support and amplify active communities' initiatives. By analysing the preliminary outcomes of this project, there can be identified two critical poles: on one hand, the design issue of having a strong communicative narrative structure within a participatory process; on the other hand, the lack of patterns recognition into a total fictional world, as a social issue. Our assumption is that the interdisciplinary work of designers, filmmakers and social scientists can build a setting enabling the inclusion of different kind of ‘usable knowledges’ (Fareri, 2009), facilitating interactions, enhancing reflexivity and generating feedback loops. Starting from the same case study, the paper presents a critical perspective on practices oriented to social innovation and on the use of storytelling in the design field and the of visual and narrative approach in social research.