Models as Narratives – Participatory Modeling

I don’t see the world in pictures. I mean, I see the world in all its beautiful shapes and colors and shadings, but I don’t interpret the world that way. I interpret the world through the stories I create. My interpretations of these stories are my own mental models of how I view the world. What I can do then, to share this mental model, is create a more formalized model, whether it is a simple picture (in my case a very badly drawn one), or a system dynamics model, or an agent-based model. People think of models as images, as representations, as visualizations, as simulations. As tools to represent, to simplify, to teach, and to share. And they are all these things, and we need them to function as these things, but they are also stories, and can be interpreted and shared as such

Author: Alison Singer