Cracking Open Co-Creation: Stories, Values, Categorizations

A recent obituary for the psychologist Jerome Bruner noted the importance of the concept of storytelling to his work: "He foregrounded narrative and storytelling as fundamental processes through which we engage with culture, providing ‘recipes for structuring experience’. They are routes to critical thinking, often juxtaposing unusual ideas, values or outcomes that generate novel insights – and questions" (Haste 2016). The quote highlights the analytical power of stories in engaging with culture, but also their creative potential in generating insight. Both these things are evident in the DTRS11 dataset, with stories and storytelling much to the fore. Indeed one of the key deliverables for the project was to come up with a ‘region relevant story’. In this paper we first show how a very particular story emerges and is reinforced during the co-creation process before then going on to consider both the categories of value and implicated actors that shape its development and the consequences that follow from its interpretation. We conclude that the interleaving of stories at many levels is characteristic of a commercial co-creation process, as well as a research process such as DTRS11, and that designers use stories as a way to negotiate what we term ‘value tension’, in this case balancing social responsibility with commercial success.