During my PhD I have been involved in undergraduate teaching on certain projects. For The Gift project I delivered a lecture on storytelling and how it relates to design, then compared different students approaches to storytelling within their projects across different cultures. To find out more about the Gift project and view my lecture, follow this link; http://theglobalstudio.eu/global_studio_projects_gift.htm.
Below is a summary of my observations:
Below is a summary of my observations:
David Parkinson
PhD Candidate, Design School, University of Northumbria
Designer Storytelling
‘All designers, like all designed objects, tell stories, sometimes deliberately, many other times without much degree of consciousness’ (Porter et al. 2004). During The Global Studio: The Gift project, student teams from each university were asked to present their outcomes through a storyboard, film or animation, making storytelling an explicit, conscious part of the brief. As a PhD candidate exploring the storytelling legacy of the design process, it was this aspect of the project that was of most interest. The Gift project provides a basis to observe cultural similarities and differences in approaching storytelling, in the context of a design process.
Persona-Scenario
It is a well-accepted notion amongst designers that storytelling can play a role during the design process as well as in the delivery of a finished concept. Visualising prospective concepts through storytelling can give a sense of purpose to the design team, as well as a wider audience (Madsen, 2010 and Moggridge, 1993). Several of the teams at interim stages posted storyboards of their initial concepts on The Gift WordPress blog to seek feedback, helping to inform decisions as the design process took place. Some examples of this were human centred, placing a persona in a scenario in order to convey the initial concepts. Group 14, comprising of students from Chiba University in Japan, used the persona of an excited child in the scenario of waking up on Easter morning to explore their initial gift concepts. However, most teams did not include this type of story at their initial concept stage, but rather presented their ideas as a series of sketches.
Hero-Protagonist
Seah (2010) states in a design blog that putting ‘the client in the hero-protagonist role’ makes for an engaging story. It is evident that this school of thought is shared across professions, Denning (2007, p.124), a business consultant, advocates this idea by stating that successful stories often ‘link the audience with a positive idea and a protagonist with whom the audience empathizes’. This also proved a common theme among the stories told by the culturally diverse teams. Group 22, made up of students from Hongik University, designed a camera that communicates with another by superimposing pictures together. ‘Long Distance Lover’, the story they told about this concept, describes a situation where a girl from their team falls in love with a boy from their partnering team during the gift giving visit. The camera is used to maintain the relationship after the visit, placing their partnering team, or client, in a hero-protagonist role. Group 28, comprising of students from Yuntech University in Taiwan, describe how a journalist from Australia, their partnering team’s country of origin, uses their concept to overcome difficulties in photographing Kangaroos. Group 3, comprising of students from Northumbria University in the U.K., use Robinson Crusoe, a character that has universal empathy, to describe the benefits of their concept.
Discussion
It is apparent that there exists commonality in storytelling approaches across culture, within the design process. However, it would seem that students from Hongik University were more computer literate when it came to animation, as they provided richer stories in this format. Other student teams provided storyboards, most frequently in a panelled comic strip formula. The unmatched skillsets of each student team proved limiting when making comparisons between storytelling in the design process across these different cultures.
References
Denning, S. (2007) The Springboard, How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations,
USA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Madsen, S. and Nielsen, L. (2010) ‘Exploring Person-Scenarios – Using Storytelling to Create Design
Ideas’, International Federation for Information Processing, 316, 57-66.
Moggridge, B. (1993) ‘Design by Storytelling’, Applied Ergonomics, 24 (1), 15-18.
Porter, L. and Sotelo, S. (2004) ‘Design by Narrative’, Congresco Internacional IERG.
Seah, D. (2010) ‘Storytelling by Design’, Available at: http://davidseah.com/blog/storytelling-by-
design [Online].
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