ABSTRACT
If our addiction to stories is as intense as Jonathan Gotschall claims, then creating conditions in which users can participate in the active construction of narratives has a powerful potential for understanding the impacts of design proposals on moral and ethical grounds. When designers are working in partnership with clients and communities they get a first-hand perspective of the users or consumers beyond the research phase and into an ongoing partnership with those who are using, adapting, and evolving their design. This, in turn, helps designers see below the surface into how these users behave, what they value and how a design decision might reinforce or re-route those values. Thinking about design in this way is more like thinking about designing conditions, rather than artifacts. These conditions can encourage users to see their surroundings in a new way, to challenge their own assumptions about what they know and how they understand space and place and encourage the public to speculate on the future of their environment.
