Collaborative art and storytelling as an empowering tool for social design

This chapter draws on two workshops carried out with a group of Anangu Aboriginal artists and the Fibrespace Incorporated textile artist group in South Australia. The two workshops are part of a two-year project titled ‘Women Living on the Edges of the World’, which is also informally known as ‘Margin to Margin’. The chapter discusses the role of art, storytelling and narrative practice as a means for local empowerment by focusing on the front end of social design processes, when artistic and social design methods are used to familiarise the participants, designers, artists or artist-researchers with one another. Empathy refers to the capacity to understand the elements that shape the realities and situations people face. Empowerment refers to the degree of self-determination and autonomy in groups or individuals and the ability to represent their interests responsibly and in the way they determine.