ABOUT
Narrative Environments is a research project and two year post-graduate course based in the Spatial Practices programme at Central Saint Martins, located in the heart of King’s Cross in central London. Narrative Environments designs environments that rethink and reorganize space and time.
With the rapid development and convergence of narrative machines, spatial computing, planetary media and enhanced realities, narrative environments are taking on new dimensions and possibilities. Binaries that have long plagued more traditional systems and architectures no longer hold, replaced with an intersectional view: interior v. exterior, utopian v. dystopian, centralized v. decentralized, writing v. images, Narrative environments investigates the implications of this changing landscape on philosophies, practices, and professional trajectories. We are designers, researchers, and students, confront and propose technologies and societies, moving seamlessly between past, present and future. We work collaboratively across design domains: immersive and interaction design, architecture, design strategy, stage design, sound design, software design, social and service design, organization design, communication design, production and direction.
This website focuses on the research and partner projects of Narrative Environments. For official information about MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, the post-graduate course curriculum, and application information, please see the official UAL webpage.
RESEARCH
MA Narrative Environments projects pivot around nine core research themes.
How media interfaces including written technologies, Large Language Models, voice recognition, and translation compose and constrain transmissions.
Language is one of the earliest human tools, and its facility and flexibility transmitted through written text in various formats as well as speech, sound, and voice. With the advent of ChatGPT, language is no longer exclusively the provenance of human beings, introducing an existential shift in human communication while enabling new possibilities of translation and communication between a vast array of beings and things. Narrative Machines investigates the historical imaginaries and research, interfaces, and communication dynamics of a world in which narrative machines are presumed and commonplace. It explores how language gets more and less complex within these systems and the niches in which it is developed and transmitted. It derives new theories of narrative based on the progeny of narrative embedded in non-human agents, explores the semiotics of deep time as embedded in environments, and in other cases discovers the ways that machinic processes of narrative have always been embedded in non-verbal forms. Narrative Machines speculates on futures where second-order memory in AI systems form wholly new ways externalise memory, cognition, and being.
How the multisensory aesthetics, logics, and dynamics of environmental representations.
Most AI research and technologies focuses on agent-based modelling, in which programming the needs and wishes of individual agents is understood as the core dynamic shaping behaviour and outcomes. Environment-based modelling starts from the other direction, exploring at how environments and contexts constrain, enable and shape agents and the various forces, dynamics, and logics that shape environments in and of themselves. Environments from ideological milieus to infrastructural forms, political and social environments, climate and ecology must be captured and rendered. Environment-based modelling shapes a dynamic and recursive understanding of environments and the ways that they are alive and shape life within them.
How interfaces, infrastructures, and ideologies encode the urban, intimate, and planetary spaces in which automation underpins social, machine, and biochemical operations.
Automation is a process of encoding and delegating decisions into structures so that they do not need to be decided at every instance. This shifts the requirements of labour and attention for human operators, and opens opportunities for activities to occur. Pervasive automation investigates the genealogies and impacts of of automation and considers the opportunities and consequences for an increasingly automated future. It reviews biological, technological, and social automation as forms of governance. It explores scenarios for a society in which many functions which currently rely on rote work or exhaustive processes are decided by encoded into environments or artefacts. How will pervasive automation shape the infrastructures, interfaces and ideologies of urban, intimate and planetary space? How will it transform production and consumption, and shift the cities from mute landscapes to ones that speak and communicate? A new understanding of the possibilities and pathologies of this automated future, and its impacts on cognition, communication, and intelligent constructions must be formed.
How various forms of intelligences emerge, evolve, and embed across human, animal, plant, and machine/AI typologies and ecologies.
Artificial Intelligence tends to be understood as in which machines become intelligent by imitating human beings. Hybrid intelligence begins with the idea that intelligences are plural, enacted in various ways and performed by various actors, human and non-human alike. The real impact of artificial intelligences is helping humans rethink what intelligence is in the first place, the forms it takes, how it differs or overlaps with wisdom, intuition, and its various composites. Hybrid intelligence investigates how various forms of intelligence begin to merge, become co-dependent, and inform one another. It considers intelligence from the perspective of cognitive or behavioural acuity, and as the ability to apply insight, reason, or knowledge from one situation to another by synthesizing multiple perspectives and accounting for situational factors. Hybrid intelligence in this context also refers to the military definition of “intelligence” as information concerning enemy manoeuvres. Hybridizing intelligence means that intelligence in the form of data, information and higher level insights must be able to be recognized, retrieved, and synthesised at key moments.
How the reorganisation of interaction, production, and experience enable effective organisation of society, culture, and communication.
During Covid, Boris Johnson awkwardly confirmed that “There is such a thing as society” overturning Margaret Thatchers famous statement that led to the neoliberal era. The past decades have seen the actual and ideological reduction and removal of more expansive projects to provision and enable society at large in the domains of transport, housing, health, care, and innovation. The grand experiments of socialism were deemed a failure, but many thinkers have continued to argue that this would be the ideal model. Suspicion of states has led to a focus on small-scale cultural projects to the benefit of large-scale private actors, encouraging the further demise of more expanded schemes to provision basic needs and enable the distribution of resources to society at large. At the same time, the core architectural organisation of places for human thriving in cities has been static or uninvented. Social Infrastructure investigates new forms for social developments across scales, catalyzing the reinvention and resurgence of cities as places for conviviality, exchange, and resource sharing, as well as the planetary composition of social institutions. Social Infrastructure develops propositions for the transformation and reinvention of social institutions, organisations, and sites that will determine the future of social forces and relations.
How new forms of organisation, experience, and resource-use based on mass distribution, access, and flourishing.
Shifts in technological capacity mean profound shifts in human purpose and experience if leveraged in the right way. In the past decade, a slew of proposals have come out positing a new role for human rights that proposes provisioning basic resources as UBx (Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Universal Basic Health, etc.) as a means for redistributing the proceeds of aggregated wealth. Many technologies start as luxuries only accessible to the few, and then with changes in production and economy, find ways to distribute their capacities to general populations. Universal Basic Luxury investigates the meaning and provision of luxury to the masses in buildings, clothing, and the arrangement of shared services, and is attached to a political philosophy of sharing rather than ownership. This necessitates a profound redefinition from luxury as scarcity to luxury as surplus, the right to repair, but it also means understanding surplus not as consumable goods but as time, but luxury as the provisioning of long-term environments for restoration. As Earth resources like water, air, light, energy, and hospitable temperatures become scarce, a new definition of luxury is emerging, one that cherishes that elegance and glory of everyday and extraordinary materials and experiences with deep impact. Universal Basic Luxury explores ways to reorganise resources and systems to enable luxury for all.
How the logics and dynamics of remote and intimate spaces converge information, performance, experience, and observation.
The typology of operating theatres as controlled spaces for observation, invention, and intervention can be traced from the first surgical theatres through to the mission control rooms that have long been ground zero sites for research and decision. These spaces require high degrees of technical specificity that changes with technological innovations, and they also necessitate performance, understood both in its sense of embodied fictioning as well as in its sense of behaviours in realising a task or function. They are also increasingly spaces in which incision, maintenance, and intervention operate through remote operations. Operating Theatres investigates this typology and its reorganisations of performance through the emergent forms of feedback, observation, and display that characterise these spaces, and the forms of enactment and re-enactment generated by remote and invasive technologies.
How the convergence of real-time information and exchange is reshaping planetary material and communications.
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PARTNERS
Narrative Environments invites partners to join researchers, students, and collaborators on design research and development that push the boundaries of what Narrative Environments can be and do.
Our partners collaborate with Narrative Environments researchers and students on short and longer-term cutting-edge in-curriculum projects, host placements with exceptionally capable students and for intensive second-year projects, and engage with our tutorial team on research, strategy, systems design, and experiences.
Past partners have included The Wellcome Collection, Scottish Association of Marine Scientists, Firmenich, Nike, New Balance, Estée Lauder Companies, MANE Global Fine Fragrance,, The Southbank Centre, Google, la Rinascente, LVMH, Sephora, Selfridges, The National Trust, Kew Gardens, The London Transport Museum, Volkswagen, Camden Council, The Autonomy Institute, ARUP, The British Library, The British Museum, Sandberg Institute Amsterdam, The Berggruen Institute Future Humans Program.
Since 2003, our students have done placements at prestigious studios, companies, and design organisations across London and the world, including Twenty Twenty, Abandon Normal Devices, Aberrant Architecture, AECOM, Akram Khan Company, Alford Hall Monaghan Morris Architects, Analog Design Lab (Tokyo), Arthesia (Zurich), Artichoke, Beyond Green, Bompas and Parr, Bowndling Adventurewear Ltd, Brixton Design Trail, Bureau Betak (Paris), Bureau of Silly Ideas, Burns and Nice, Crick / Wellcome Trust , Cruz Studio, Curious Space, Darling & Edge, Dax Callner, Decorex, Delfina Foundation, Designers Block, dRMM, Duncan Mccauley (Berlin), Elemental Design, Es Devlin Studios, European Space Agency (Netherlands), Event Communications Ltd, FCBStudios, Fernando Laposse, Freestate, Future City, Gainsbury + WhiEng, Glass Design, Hemingway Design, Holition, Hotel Seokyo (Seoul), Hua Gallery, Ideo, Ignite, Intel, Jack Morton, Lanzavecchia+Wai, Lindon Gallery, London Design Biennale, Made for Brands (Beirut), Marafiki Community (Kenya), Mark Lawson Bell, Marshmallow Laser Feast, MET Studio Design Ltd, Millington Associates, Mimosa House, Ministry of Stories, Sustrans, The British Museum, The Decorators, The Glass House Community led design, The National Maritime Museum, The Principals (New York), Tianjin Urban Planning Institute (China), Union Gallery Muster, National Trust, O’Neill Ross (FFTA), Old Royal Naval College, OMA (Rotterdam), Pace Gallery, Paper Cinema, Pedan, Phil Cooper, Phoebe Cummings, Publica, Punchdrunk, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Real Studios, River Film, Royal Historic Palaces, Ruedi Bau (Paris), Scenic Sets, Selfridges, Maco Decoration (Shanghai), Snark (Italy), Social Innovation Exchange, and others.
Narrative Environments works with partners to design briefs of shared relevance to the research and production goals of the course, and to develop projects that activate student visions and tutor expertise. Most projects are driven by research, concept and/or prototype development. Our tutorial team mentors partnership projects. It includes designers who have founded or contributed to work in design studios and organisations, including Very Very Far Away, Superflux, The Decorators, Comuzi, Autonomy, Heatherwick Studio, and the Irish Architecture Foundation.
Partners typically connect with student groups three times during any project: at the beginning (to orient), middle (to choose direction), and end (to reflect on outcomes).
Partners benefit in the following ways:
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Student curiosity and engagement around briefs brings cutting-edge and generational vision to challenges
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We work with partners that have amazing stories to tell—about their research, organization, stakeholders or places. We bring these stories, from the mundane to extraordinary, in innovative ways.
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Our design approach is strategic, ecological, and based on continuous evolution and feedback. We design according to real constraints and unforeseen opportunities
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CSM is a world-leading brand. Our communications and promo teams lend emphasis and excitement to our partners
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Our students are developing exceptional design practices to ideas about science, technology, utility, social futures, and intelligence.
When appropriate, CSM MANE is happy to instigate collaborations with other courses as depending on interest and timing. Previous collaborations have included MA Industrial Design, MA Material Futures, MA Architecture, MA Fashion Communication, and MA Performance Design Practice.
Partners work with CSM’s excellent Innovation & Business team, and most projects carry IP acquisition for at least one team project concept/ prototype. Many partners decide to purchase further IP based on the success of outcomes, or in the case of research-based projects, IP can be covered for the entire project as part of the contract.
MANE regularly works with partners on funding bids for innovation and research. We also work with design partners to support pitches to industry that include CSM students as part of the overall proposal. Please contact Course Leader Stephanie Sherman to explore those opportunities and those below directly.
YR1 Projects w/ Partners
(Autumn Term: 7 weeks mid-October-late November)
YR1 Projects w/ Partners
(Spring Term: 7 weeks late Jan-early March)
DesignatHons w/ Partners
(All terms: 1 day-3 days)
Placements w/ Partners
(mid-May to mid-June for 50+ hours for teams of 2-5 students)
Sponsored RESEARCH Projects & Bursaries
(All terms)
PEOPLE
Studio
We work out of our studio base in the Granary Building in Kings Cross, central London, but the city is our laboratory. The studio is a base station from which we work virtually, with media and technical production, print, and other resources throughout CSM, and in spaces and with institutions and organizations across London.
Staff & Tutors
Our staff and tutors include Stephanie Elyse Sherman (Course Leader, Antikythera), Beth Shepherd (Stage 1 Leader), Xavi Llarch Font (Stage 2 Leader, The Decorators), Sitraka Rakatonianina (Interaction/ Speculative Design, Very Very Far Away), Nico Alexandroff (Environmental Architecture, Design Research), Claire Healey (Music, Architecture, Narratives), Bethany Rigby (Speculation, Exhibitions), Tom Butler (foresight, narrative theory), Alex Quicho (writing, scenario design), Camille (video, superflux).
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Students
MA Narrative students come from across the world and across disciplines, across ages and experiences.
MA Narrative Environments
Central Saint Martins
Official Website
Email
INSTAGRAM
Website & Identity Design by Jonathan Neilson
Design Strategy by Cecilia Martin
Website Development by Soka Studios
PARTNER
PROJECTS
REMOTE OPERATIONS
SWISS CENTRE FOR DESIGN & HEALTH: 2024
A project developing a framework for the five stages of remoteness in health, medicine and wellness, focused on scenarios of remote operating theatres.
Co-Living 2030
SPACE10: 2018
Scenarios imagining the future of shared habitation.
15-minute FutureS
London Transport Museum: 2021
A flash film installation speculating 2030 London across scales.
Cosmic Infrastructuring
Jodrell Bank / SKAO / Shanghai Astronomy Museum: 2024
A series of cli-fi shorts to the new order of the universal array.
Technospheric Games – FODHA
Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS): 2023
A gamed VR experience for science communication.
The Future of Urban Mobility
Volkswagen: 2018
Scenarios for driverless experiences.
Olfactive Futures
Firmenich: 2021
Worldbuilding potential fragrance futures.
Sensorium
Firmenich: 2022
Immersive installation concepts exploring the future of smell.
Starpunk – Amber Ember
Berggruen Institute Future Humans: 2023
A VR experience imagining an alternative sun, as part of ongoing research and development. #starpunk
Poetrics
Google: 2015
An interactive collective poetry generator.
GLOBAL BEAUTY FUTURES
Estée Lauder Companies: 2023
Future beauty experiences.
