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Storytelling for Systems Design: Embedding and communicating complex and intangible data through narratives

Format: Papers, RSD10, Topic: Methods & Methodology

Elise Talgorn and Monique Hendriks

Our research explores how storytelling can support complex systems thinking. In systems thinking, a major challenge is to communicate a large amount of data of complex systems and to give meaning to this data through expressing intangible aspects such as interpretation, intuition, purpose, mental bias, and uncertainty. This is key for systems thinkers to fully apprehend systems, but also for other stakeholders involved in the co-design process to easily access this complexity. There is a need for practical tools that embed in the systems design process the systems’ complexity associated with relevant intangible aspects. Narratives do have the potential to gather, embed, make understandable and memorable the complex and intangible data of systems. We propose several uses of systemic storytelling, an approach based on building parallel story arcs constructed on and/or connected by systems’ elements. Systemic storytelling combines logical analysis with an intuitive and empathetic comprehension of systems. This approach has benefits at several stages of the systems design process: to engage stakeholders and enable the sharing and capturing of their different perspectives, to effectively communicate systems insights, and to ideate on future systems. In this short paper, we describe the method principles and show three preliminary application examples.

Keywords: storytelling, complexity, intangibility, perspective, communication

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Citation Data

Author(s): Elise Talgorn and Monique Hendriks
Year:
Title: Storytelling for Systems Design: Embedding and communicating complex and intangible data through narratives
Published in: Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design
Volume:
Article No.:
URL: https://rsdsymposium.org/
Host:
Location:
Symposium Dates:
First published: 3 September 2021
Last update:
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Copyright Information

Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (ISSN 2371-8404) are published annually by the Systemic Design Association, a non-profit scholarly association leading the research and practice of design for complex systems: 3803 Tønsberg, Norway (922 275 696).

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Open Access article published under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. This permits anyone to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or form according to the licence terms.

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Author(s). (20##). Article title. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD##. Article ##. rsdsymposium.org/LINK

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