Scenarios that tell a Story. Normative Narrative Scenarios – An Efficient Tool for Participative Innovation-Oriented Foresight

The German Research Dialogue Futur aims at the identification and elaboration of socalled lead visions for research policy in a creative, participatory process with hundreds of experts. Within this process normative narrative scenarios play an important role. They are normative, since they describe a preferable, visionary future, they are narrative, since they portray the future in the way a science fiction story does – with human protagonists and a rudimentary plot. Normative narrative scenarios serve not only as a means of communication within the process and to the public, but in particular as a tool to foster creativity and to combine technology foresight with social contexts and to strengthen, more generally, the side of societal demand in foresight processes. The paper outlines the process of construction of normative narrative scenarios. Vision building in expert workshops is the starting point. Supported by several feedback rounds, scenario writing is then achieved by a small team, utilizing storyboards and narrative techniques known from writing fiction. During transfer workshops, tailored to specific goals or target groups, the scenarios can be analysed with respect to their visionary content, to obstacles and barriers mentioned, and to first steps for implementation. The specific advantage of normative narrative scenarios is that that they explicitly take into account as well value-orientations as the intricacies of everyday behaviour. They can at least partly counterbalance the technology bias in some foresight processes.