Narrative Environments

RELATED TERMS: Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments – Celia Pearce; Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture

A narrative environment is a many-dimensional, orientational interface. In one direction, it makes the world comprehensible and navigable. In another direction, it opens up to the challenges that the world  presents or harbours. It may explain, but in doing so it also questions; it may settle yet it also unsettles; it may ground but it also un-grounds and re-grounds. It is here, there and elsewhere; it is now, then and of other times. Another way of seeking to understand its status is to say that a narrative environment is an argument about the real, in the real.

The narrative aspect seeks to assist our understanding of complex issues. The value of narrative is that, as Adam Rutherford (2024) says, “We understand big ideas through storytelling.” It takes what we know about what exists and challenges the accompanying conventions, norms and expectations, the anticipated paths of narration and action. 

The environmental aspect addresses the materialities and media of our embodied experience, the interaction of embodied and embedded knowledge (‘tertiary retentions’, in Stiegler’s term, in various media materialities) and the immersive modalities of existence brought into play. The environment, as medium, is the co-existence of a set of ecosystems, such as, for example, the media ecosystem (the information environment), the technological ecosystem (the infrastructural environment) and the ‘natural’ environment (the already existent, that into which we are thrown, that which we accept as ‘given’, in which is enfolded our socio-historical existence).

Reference

Rutherford, A. (2024) The Atomic Human by Neil Lawrence review – return of the Terminator, Guardian, 22 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/20/the-atomic-human-by-neil-lawrence-review-return-of-the-terminator (Accessed: 15 July 2024).