Narrating value networks through tangible materials

Physical materials are widely used by design facilitators to support shared sensemaking and collaborative representations of abstract and intangible systems. This paper illustrates one aspect of how tangible materials, or objects, matter in relation to the kind of narratives produced in, by and about organisations. Focusing on how participants in tangible workshops create narrations through the use of a variety of objects, we show that participants typically identify one particular salient property of an external relation. We then illustrate that participants, despite this variety, tend to use the salient properties of objects in very similar manners, namely to create metaphors with what we term “negative associations”. In other words, the end-result, independently of what object is being used and of what property of that object is invoked, is the creation of a metaphor that portrays an organization’s relations as fraught with matters of power differences, competition, struggles and the like. This perspective on the relation between the properties of objects in workshop toolkits and the resultant narratives is hoped to benefit the designers, users, and analyzers of tangible toolkits concerned with organisational relations and innovation landscapes more generally, and future perspectives are proposed.