If the stories behind our physical things help to add value at the point of purchase (provenance) and throughout the lifetime of a product (object narrative), why can’t that value extend beyond our ownership and follow these items to their final resting places? With the launch of their newest project, Trash Track, MIT researchers  from the SENSEable City Laboratory endeavor to do just that, using electronic tags to trace the things we throw away as they move through the entire disposal system.

By monitoring the time and costs associated with transporting our garbage to dumps and landfills, the MIT team hopes to [...]

We may have survived the MTV Generation with our attention spans mostly intact, but it appears the same can’t be said for the age of the Internet, where competing streams of information, multi-tasking and multiple screens are dissecting our withering focus into easily digestible bits. Add in our increased need for immediacy, and an old-fashioned idea like the narrative starts to seem a bit obsolete.
Nowhere is this more evident perhaps, than in the way we consume video online, where the average attention span is three to five minutes, hardly enough time for a classic tale filled with fleshed out characters, [...]

What adds value to the items we own? Beyond quantifiable and tangible factors like price, performance and comfort, we find slightly more vague notions that rely more on an emotional than intellectual response. Attaching meaning in this way, is a phenomenon Rob Walker calls an object’s narrative, the memories we associate with inanimate things, from their provenance to their mere existence at significant points in our lives. It helps explain why we hang on to wedding dresses when they no longer fit and refer to beat-up caps as our “lucky hats.” But what happens to value when we learn the [...]

The use of setting can be the difference between an okay story and a truly great one. Place not only adds context to a narrative, but it can take on a life all its own, playing a vital role in shaping the lives of the characters throughout the tale. With that in mind, London’s Royal Parks organization has commissioned eight authors to find inspiration in the city’s grandest green spaces by penning short stories that take place in them. Participating authors include Will Self, Ali Smith and William Boyd. In an effort to lend these location-based narratives even greater relevancy, the finished [...]

Wired columnist Scott Brown informs us that the traditional model of storytelling is broken.  From Brown’s perspective, our tried and true formulas like Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” and Freytag’s Pyramid that involve a simple narrative structure – beginning, middle and end – no longer adequately convey the multidimensional complexities of our plugged-in, have it your way in an instant style world, but thankfully he has already compensated for all of that. He offers us his new dramatic model – Brown’s Ziggurat (in 4-D!)tm. And even goes so far as to test his theory on one of our generation’s seminal tales, “Die Hard.” Using [...]