The StoryMapper: Piloting a Traveling Placemaking Interface for Inclusion and Emplacement

As aresponse to traditional (top‐down) urban planning processes, placemaking engages local citizens in the process of shaping form, social activity, and meaning places around them. However, practices similarly face political challenges regarding inclusion emplacement. These relate who participates, facilitation through linguistic discourse, place engagement itself. Attempting address these challenges, this article (based on a pilot study) reports design deployment StoryMapper, traveling interface that uses participant‐driven “chain engagement” recruiting invite participants create emplaced “morphings” (i.e., visually produced stories superimposed public space) spark dialogue digitally facilitated living map. This study took within larger project share their ideas reconversion community church. Plugging Storymapper into project, we discuss preliminary findings relating role facilitators citizen‐driven recruitment multimodality processes. suggests should not only be evaluated based participates does not, but also how tool itself, its capacity engage visualize complex ideas, may facilitate different publics.