Abstract:

Telling and listening stories are the natural instruments of human relationships. Telling stories is a way of interaction and also of self-consciousness. In a context in which communication is affected by a sort of pollution due to useless information, there is a need to retrieve the dimension of a critical reflection and of utopian fantasy: telling and listening stories enables people to explore possible worlds, to accept thought and communication paradoxes, to read emotions.

Words are the place of a continuous self-construction: a story is never "retold", stories are remade and challenged by the experience. The emerging of a narrative style in the communication studies and in various fields of knowledge has led to a vision where the storytelling assumes a central cognitive function: reading novels, entering their worlds, taking the views of their characters allows people to get rid of a perspective of self-sufficiency, putting together pieces of different stories in an endless construction of new ones. The stories are a tool that belongs to both the culture and the mind. In fact, people build them to maintain cultural exchanges, to understand the world and themselves. They lead to understanding through transformation, because by telling to the others the world that people have within themselves, allow them to understand it, to externalize it and make it cultural.

The storytelling is a tool that does not separate learning from doing. If telling the reality is understanding it, understanding it is already changing it: in other words, the storytelling is also a project. A project is a proposal of new relationships between things that already exist, the research of really useful, and therefore beautiful, combinations. The need for beauty, that in the context of crisis is felt with particular force, can find answers in the narrative. People lack of opportunities to experiment different forms of storytelling.

The paper describes a project, carried out at Politecnico di Milano within the framework of the Continuing Education Course in Architecture and Structure MetaDesign (ASMeD) - InFormAction (IFA), aimed to develop models of participatory communication, that can overcome the dichotomy between author and audience, between written texts and audio-visual contents, including music and images. Through this project, suggestions will be provided that ultimately can encourage students to gain a greater awareness of their own resources, to explore an unknown inner space where sometimes they can find stories and words which not only can be told but can also enrich their daily lives. In particular, new ways of storytelling will be searched, designing crosses between different forms of cultural experience both humanistic and technical, encouraging the active involvement of the public in a collaborative bottom-up approach.

Keywords:

Storytelling, identity, memory, architectural design.