Design and power: The importance of stories (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and others, define our identities. Stories of people and events become the history of a culture; stories construct frameworks of meaning-making. King (2003) observes that “stories are dangerous” in deference to their power to create and legitimize. 
 
 Many of our stories are so apparently transparent that they have become invisible and assumed; they are no longer ‘stories’ but understood as objective ways of being and knowing. Even these stories present views, which, as Thiong’o (1993) explains, exhibit underlying asymmetrical access to power. Asymmetric structures of power, when applied over the way we communicate a certain subject can transform the subject itself and reinforce these same structures, creating a vortex of colonised culture around the topics that are discussed, who has a voice and what code of ethics is in use. When the subject is Design and the artifacts Design puts into the world, this vortex becomes even more powerful due to Design’s own nature as culture creator and producer of ‘stories’...