Stories as solutions

When you write a story, you use your imagination to imagine something that does not yet exist. And it can open up completely new ways of thinking through professional and socially relevant issues. The working method is called 'stories as solutions'.

With different writing, knowledge and perspectives, the researchers have written about everything from the urban life of silent populations to the properties of small parks and reflections on cities' greenhouse gas accounts.

The researchers come from the fields of landscape architecture, urban planning, urban life studies, physical and social geography, anthropology, cultural studies and micro-meteorology.

Stories as Solutions is a method that uses writing stories as a way to activate our imagination and create new solutions.

Narratives can help us understand which solutions we should work towards, why and how. Just as narratives, unlike many other methods, can easily bind together otherwise incompatible forms of knowledge, publics and platforms. The stories are therefore in themselves part of finding solutions.

The method was developed with inspiration from 'Writing Academic Texts Differently' edited by Nina Lykke (Rotledge, 2014).

The book provides various instructions on how researchers and research collectives can work with writing and narrative methods that differ from the classic academic genres by drawing on, for example, personal, lived experience, anecdotes, situation descriptions or cultivating a personal writing style. By working in a reflective and structured manner with writing in facilitated writing communities, it is possible to find new ways of thinking through academic and socially relevant issues.