ABSTRACT
Stories connect people in all cultures, and it is more or less impossible to go through life without stories. Via the cultural practice of narrating stories, people understand and create their own ‘reality’. The narrative mode of thinking and the act of narrating interact: people organise experiences in narrative explanatory models and construct their experience in narrative patterns. Narrative principles can be used for design processes to represent and create relationships between humans, space and actions. This is particularly of interest in ongoing planning and design tasks characterised by structures of spatial phenomena and dimensions. The level of communication and negotiation is taking on ever greater importance in design activities. Hille von Seggern has called this level of strategic communication an intermediary between concrete projects and large-scale, long-term concepts. This leads to the task of shaping the forms of communication that structure the dialogue with participants in planning processes.
