E.14 with Jason Winn

Today we’re welcoming Jason Winn, Founder and Director at Narrative Infrastructure. He’s also an architect and urban planner with a focus on long-term design. The term narrative infrastructure refers to the basic structure that underlies the rest of the infrastructures that we all live around, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this episode.

Narrative infrastructure sees the world around us as a setting for our stories. All the environments that we live in are a mixing of each other’s stories. By being able to demonstrate that graphically and show how stories might be interfering with one another will tell us what the combined story is for that location.

When visual cues have been erased, narrative techniques can be used to build them back with the correct references to the past. Stories that have been passed on can always be used to rebuild, whereas images in a person’s memory cannot. Jason gives an example of when recreating infrastructure becomes meaningless if stories are not used.

For people who want to map the stories of their own community, it’s important to take the time to tell their own story. As long as it’s been recorded, it has the potential to be incorporated and mapped. Google Earth allows you to record voice and a flythrough on a map, which are fundamental building blocks of a narrative infrastructure.

There are technological challenges with recording narratives, mainly that the stories must not be tampered with. The stories need to be ethically of the individuals who has the experiences.