Narrative for artifacts: transcending context and self

Abstract

We discuss the importance of narrative intelligence (story-awareness, story-telling, historical grounding) in regard to an agent's transcendence of its immediate local temporal context to create a broad temporal horizon in which the experience and future of the agent can be accounted for, together with the advantage that narrative provides to sociality by making the experience of others available without the risk of having to undergo the experience for one's self. Concepts and consequences for the design of artifacts are surveyed, together with a brief description of a formal algebraic framework affording support for narrative grounding.