Fang Fang and Jie Wu
Against the backdrop of rapid urban renewal and spatial restructuring, communities are often reduced to a single spatial narrative, causing the historical experiences, emotional connections, and everyday memories of different actors to be compressed or obscured. From the perspective of systemic design, this paper explores how intelligent narrative can serve as a method for organising memory, connecting plural experiences within communities and re-presenting obscured historical relationships. Through workshops, semi-structured interviews, the construction of a community memory corpus, generative narrative, and the co-creation of interactive prototypes, the study examines the process through which individual memories are transformed into community narratives. The findings show that intelligent narrative can transform dispersed and fragmented memories into narrative structures that are connectable, experiential, and generative. It challenges the limitations imposed by singular histories and linear time on community understanding, allowing the experiences of different actors to be juxtaposed, responded to, and reinterpreted within the same system. This paper argues that the value of intelligent narrative lies not only in recording the past, but more importantly in organising and connecting community memories to support the recovery of plural histories, the formation of intersubjective understanding, and the collective imagination of community futures.
Keywords: Systemic design, intelligent narrative, community memory, plural histories, generative narrative