Wonder Cards Storytelling: Imagination, Storytelling, and Role-playing in the Creation of Objects, Spaces, and Experiences

Abstract

This article explores storytelling and role-playing as resources to create objects, spaces, and experiences in the field of design. To this end, we present Wonder Cards. The game is an “imagination instrument” that, through distant analogies (de Cruz and de Smedt 2010), assist in the development of narratives. A tale needs to arouse feelings – empathy, love, fear, nostalgia, and many others. The materiality of this abstraction helps the individual generate notions of belonging and temporality for himself and for others (Pallasma 2012). Human beings express themselves through objects and spaces: what we call our material culture. They are an indispensable part of the materialization of sensations and affect. Accordingly, magnificent tales create memories that express the objects and spaces invented. Objects and spaces within an intrinsic narrative create memory. Memory helps construct and preserve cultural and personal identity, since living itself is a constant movement toward recollection (Cardoso 2011). Therefore, the merging of objects with subjectivity is exceedingly important to culture construction. Nonetheless, how does one create these tales? Structures can facilitate this creative process. This article presents the constitutive elements of our creative tool, the implemented experiments, discussions, and debriefings (Atwater 2016) derived from the use of the card game on workshops and design classes at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. These activities with participants, objects, spaces, and experiences are explored by the creation of narrative scenes and storytelling resources through fantasy (Barthes 2013) and role-playing (Bienia 2016) and by using the Wonder Cards. This union enables the participants to live situations removed from the creative environment where they usually work, thus stimulating creation in new situations and imaginary narrative environments. The Wonder Cards assist in the construction of tales, which inspire the development of objects, spaces, and experiences by the participants.