Viewing Category: Storytelling
I've been pulling together my thoughts on a design approach based on the power of storytelling. While I still haven't quite figured out what it is, I have started to chain some realizations together.
The Failure of Thing-Focused Design
The failure of much design stems from the lack of engagement between creator and audience. As we creators grow more and more specialized, the tendency to describe what we are doing with precise bursts of jargon increases, balkanizing the creative landscape with specialists who spend more time talking to themselves than communicating ideas to regular people. And yet, it's the people that matter most, both in terms of social fulfilment and in revenue.
While the idea of "story" in design is not new in the context of Human-Computer Interaction, Usability, and Experience Design, I haven't yet seen a whole lot of emphasis on the quality of storytelling. The literature cites story as a way of defining a user, which is useful for workflow visualization; ironically, storytelling itself is not part of the toolkit.
Storytelling Doesn't Just Describe Relationships; It Also Creates Them!
I'm interested in a process that's more immediate and primal. I think of the "art of storytelling" (as opposed to just having a descriptive story) as a two-way modelling process. It's a more engaging way to introduce individual people to new ideas and concepts. Stories and storytelling go back to the dawn of humanity; it is arguably the way we understand the world, and it's also arguably the most compelling commonality in the development of all our media technology. Yes, specialized jargon is inevitable when discussing the inner workings of the technology amongst ourselves. However, we must recognize that the inner workings themselves are relevant only to other practitioners. What matters most to me is putting that technology in service of the storytelling; becoming a better storyteller is at the heart of being a designer with relevance in the real world. This is performance by proxy, showmanship applied with purpose. When you help someone understand new technology in the context of their understanding of the world, they can co-creation the new reality with you because they can envision their place in it. That's the power of great storytelling. Great exposition doesn't reach as far. It's just boring, which anyone who has had to read a functional spec can attest.
The difference in approach can be illustrated as follows:
The specialist designer provides a menu of services and skills related to production, and then asks the client what they want. What format? How many colors? What's the copy? How many pages? What should it look like? And then, they produce to an evolving specification based on user modelling and iterative testing.
The storyteller-designer, by comparison, first asks about motivation and desire, and designs for the dramatic moments. The primary goal is not to produce to a functional spec, but to create a story about the cllient, with the client in the hero-protagonist role. Only then are the production skills are applied to create causal elements in the real world. The difference is that the story doesn't remain a fiction; when executed well, the story makes the client's reality. And if all goes well, the story takes on a life of its own.
I believe the concept of the storyteller-designer is what I'm actually moving toward. It focuses not on process and technology, but on creating events placed in a meaningful human context. And that's where all the action is, IMHO.
Mind you, I am not saying that Usability is useless. However, "user models" and "archetypes" are mere descriptive anchors; the role of "story" in the context of Usability is to package user behaviors into a concise blueprint useful for general systems modelling. The flow of information is one-way: behavior is observed, iterated upon, and re-observed. While the users are involved in the process as the "target" audience, they are more like statistical parameters in the system design. That's fine, and that's not what I'm talking about.
The approach of Storytelling by Design, as I'm trying define it, is about interfacing with clients using an approach that emphasizes story as the primary unit of understanding, as opposed to "pages", "Flash", "PHP", "look and feel" and "rounds of revision". You can also think of it as "speaking the language of the client" taken a little farther; using storytelling techniques in client communication to create engagement and understanding of the creative process. It's also a given that storytelling is the focus of the creative work; this is well understood in any customer-facing endeavor that's intended to be viewed by actual people (e.g. Advertising)
Later this week I'll talk a bit more about how the process of practicing "Storytelling by Design" works.
UPDATE: I just found this article that talks about something very similar! So I'm not alone in this :-)
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What makes Shaker Design so compelling? I found this insight from New Yorker magazine particularly fascinating:
When we make objects that look like us, we unconsciously are flattering ourselves. The Shakers made objects that look like objects, and that follow a non-human law of design.
I like to think of my design as being "true" to the nature of the work being performed; I find it very difficult to come up with visual style in a vacuum. I will ask a million questions and try to "walk the space" where the design will actually be used. I'll want to know how the client thinks how people will be using the object, and most important what they think they'll be thinking or feeling. Once I have that, I can design: I borrow stylistic elements when a strong visual association must be made, or I'll make something that really tries to fly the nape of the workflow. The design flows, once the essential questions are answered. It can take a while to get to that point, since oftentimes the questions themselves have yet to be transmuted into essential form. Typically, the conversation goes like this:
Client: "We are selling widgets, and we want users to buy them."
Me: "Why would users want to buy your widgets?"
Client: "Because we're selling them. And they're, uh, good."
Me: "Right. But why would users want to buy your widgets? Specifically yours, and not someone elses?"
Client: "Um."
At that point, the conversation goes one of three ways:
The client says, "um...look, the website just needs to be pretty." And I think, "The client doesn't understand his/her own product, and isn't interested in figuring it out. This is not a good project for me."
The client pauses and says, "I'll tell you exactly why!" and rattles off a dozen things. And I think, "Cool! These guys are on the ball, and maybe we can have a real design dialogue."
The client pauses, and asks "Good question. What do you think?" and then I rattle off a dozen things that come to mind as how something might be compelling to a particular user, and why. Then we are having a real design dialogue, and that's awesome too. Now we're getting to the essence of things.
For me, design is about dialogue, because without dialogue I can't get to the essence of the object, service, or thing that I am supposed to be designing. Design is a dialogue between multiple parties: the client and myself, and dialogue by proxy with the intended audience. By the latter, I mean that the object that I'm making needs to be able to communicate. The object has to be clear in its purpose on first view, expressively and eloquently so. It will whisper in the user's ear, "I am the very spirit of what you have been seeking, standing here before you. You have been looking for me all your life. Or at least, since Lunch. Let's get something done, and have a good time doing it! "
Although I am anthropomorphizing objects in this imaginary dialoge, there is a clear line between "human talk" and "object talk". Objects have their own vocabulary: a good user interface is designed expressly to convey what that vocabulary is and how it is used. That's not the same as writing a lot of fake human chatter to give the UI some "personality"...at best, that manages to simulate a helpful but ultimately clueless sales droid at a big box retailer. Who wants that?
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In the last thread, Tim Beadle wrote:
I may be missing something (and I am in no way an expert!), but isn’t story-based design the same as persona-based design?
I realize there's a namespace collision here, and I'm glad Tim bring it up. There's a distinction I'm trying to make between the "usability" notion of story-based design and what I'm trying to define. The distinction lies with how I think of the application of story to design.
One thing that bugs me slightly about "usability" (and I admittedly have not worked directly with many experts or professional firms) is that the approach is rather depersonalized and dry. For all the talk of "story" and "personas", reaching as far back as the early 90s...there just hasn't been much passion in them. If I were to describe the stereotypical "usability expert", I think of an insightful, quiet person with the uncanny ability to make perpective-shaking adjustments in a product or process by asking a simple question: "how do people really interact?" And then they would produce a wonderfully-written document that states the newfound principles of design with such clarity that it takes my breath away. My eyes would widen in appreciation of the accompanying diagrams, visually designed with such power that I can't help but absorb the concepts I had just read about. I immediately put it up on my wall, circling one particularly-glorious info-blob and writing YES!!! next to it in bold red Sharpie.
Then I go have lunch, and forget about it.
The usability expert wonders what the hell happened, but as a consultant he's already on to the next gig, hoping that maybe his ground-breaking insights will actually take root in more fertile soil. The problem is that for all the work that went into clarifying those important, business-altering insights, the expert has failed to engage us. In the worst case scenario, the usability expert becomes a prophet, crying out warnings of the Coming Infocalypse that is already upon us, Web 2.0 methodologies already dangerously swaying out of control. But no one cares, because the prophet is still making the mistake of addressing people in the abstract, as personas. They're not engaging me or my reality as an individual. They're talking about someone like me, but not me. There is no feeling of personal relationship, and I think that's pretty important.
Let's look at this another way: you've written some kick-ass user stories for your software product! High five, guys! With these documents, the development process finally has real focus and guidance. In fact, these user stories are SO GOOD that you're submitting them as-is to a number of literary short story competitions!
Oh wait...they're not that good, at least not in that way. If I were to take off my usability goggles, in what way are these personas useful outside the context of software development?
Stories go far beyond software development and is at the crux of several trends I've been watching: Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users, Joel Spolsky's Best of Software Writing, Donald Norman's Emotional Design, the Experience Design movement, even online comics, the Clue Train and leadership... all of these center around story, emotion, heroism, and visualization. Story is a lot more than just personas and models. Stories are what motivate and connect people with action, set examples to follow, and are most importantly personally relevant.
That is what I am interested in. I think it's a given that passionate users are empowered users. What I want to figure out is how to be a passionate creator, and how to leverage my newly rediscovered passions for writing, teaching, and community building in a way that is approachable by people who intuitively understand this, but can't quite put it yet into words. "Story Based Design" isn't the phrase...it's something else.
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I've been mulling over the idea of story-based design as a way to describe my design process. What I'm interested in is finding and telling stories that are engaging, uplifting, helpful, and inspiring. I can't design anything until I can find that angle. To me, design is all about communicating that message through whatever media I can get my hands on.
I think there's a similarity between what I'm doing with Experience Design, a growing multidisciplinary subset of graphic design. However, a lot of the materials I see on this are less than inspiring. Take this copy, for example, from the AIGA Experience Design page:
What is experience design?
Experience design strives to create experiences beyond products and services. Its boundaries extend beyond traditional design.
The prose sounds very clear and insightful, but ironically none of it provides any meaningful experience that I can latch on to. Where's the relevance to me? Where's the story? The words are nicely crafted and fit together; any respectable design agency would be proud to have copy like that on their "Our Process" page. What's missing is a sense of engagement.
The "story-based design" term is also referenced in a few online articles related to usability and human-centered design practice, but this isn't what I'm talking about either. I can appreciate the value of such practice, and I recognize the importance of focusing on the (duh) user when you're making things for them. What's most important, though, is imparting the sense that you're doing it for them, not around them. That is a critical distinction. It's nice to know that someone's doing something to make your work more productive, but really...I want to feel that sense of rapport as well.
The name "story based design" sounds very clunky to me, so it's just a working title for a philosophy-under-development (PUD). So far, there are four steps:
- Get to know a person and his/her world.
- Tell that person how he/she is relevant to the world.
- Create a story about that person.
- Tell the story to the audience that wants to hear it
I'm not naturally a visual person; before I can lay pixels down, I have to have a pretty clear idea of what is being said, why, and how. Essentially, I compose an essay or a story in my head first. I often write my thoughts down too. This becomes the script for the visual design, when I draw upon my associative memory to pick what audiovisual elements will communicate in the best way. Laying out a page for me is like directing a short film. I know I can control the order of how people look on things on the page through composition and contrast, which gives me tremendous expressive power.
It's not exactly an artistic process, but it's one that I'm realizing is just as valid. Many designers I talk to are far more talented in the visual realm than I; I'm primarily a word person that just happens to like graphics and programming, and in the past I've thought I was somehow not "doing it right". I no longer believe that's the case, so here I am making up new terminology again :-)
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It's easy to be productive when I'm feeling happy and focused, but right now I ain't: I'm downright grouchy, thinking about bbq that I can't have and I can't feel my toes. In other words, it's the perfect time to think about motivation from a negative perspective.
I’ve been having a kind of blah week, which may be related to the strict diet low-carb diet I'm enduring. Then my file server crashed (needed a shiny new power supply, see pic). And the weather is, as my cousin Ben once succinctly put it, "stupidly cold." I’m feeling pretty damn unproductive and unmotivated.
Ordinarily I’d cook something yummy like my favorite curry or ribs dishes and pig out to cheer myself up, but I’m on a diet that, damn it, is actually working, so stuffing my face is not an option. Crap crap crap. Maybe I'll take a nap.
I was surprised to see a ghostly form hovering over my desk. I thought it might have been a smudge on my glasses, but then it SPOKE.
"I AM THE GHOST...OF SLOTHFULNESS!" the ghostly form said by, by way of introduction. "I'm here to tell you that you're a fat, lazy, unmotivated do-nothingnik! Through hard work and unwavering commitment, you could have achieved greatness! Actually, I don't mean you specifically...that's pretty obvious. You are not 1/10th of the man your father and grandfather was. Not even a shmidge."
"And you're a big dork!" the ghost added, dissolving languidly into a vortex of spite. Before I could react, another ghost appeared in its stead.
"AND I AM THE GHOST OF TALENTLESSNESS!" intoned the new ghost, dressed conservatively in a gray suit and expensive leather shoes. "It is obvious to me that you're not talented enough, not smart enough, and not accomplished enough to grab hold of the brass ring, let alone hold on to it." The ghost paused dramatically, smugly satisfied with its pronouncement.
"What!?" I exclaimed indignantly, "Surely there is some special talent or collection of skills that are exceptional in the right circumstances! Maybe personality + talents would---"
"No no no, that's not how it works." the ghost said impatiently. "If you'd had any real talent, it would have manifested itself---at the latest---by your 21st birthday. Too bad you didn't do more work in high school and college...that might have made up for your dearth of talent, and you could have gone to a really good grad school. Then you might have had a shot. But no...I want to find my passion..." The ghost minced around in a circle, hands waving in mock panic. "I need to know my purpose in life! I'm a maverick! I'm a lone wolf!"
The ghost stopped, suddenly serious, and looked around cautiously before whispering to me in a confidential manner. "Now, I don't usually give advice, but you should really consider joining a company that has very simple and repetitive task requirements. You know, something you could be good at without straining yourself and asking why? why? all the time. Be a good cog in some larger, more important machine, contributing to the bottom line for someone else under a stern manager that knows how to kick your ass. Then maybe you'd amount to something, earn that level 3 salary, have a nice bennies package and maybe a matching 401K. You'll have people to go bowling with. You like bowling! Wouldn't that be nice? No more sitting at home in your basement on Friday night. Alone. But that's not my area of expertise. My colleague will fill you in on that." With that the ghost glanced at his Seiko, muttered, and poofed away.
The third ghost didn't appear immediately, probably to give me time to reflect upon my wasted years. Thinking back on that, though, I can't really say that any of them were wasted. Maybe I didn't push everything through to their "optimal conclusion" as measured by other people's metrics, and I didn't cave in on my principles (though, admittedly, they have not always been correct). Really, the only thing that has me down is not being in as strong a financial position as I'd like, so I could worry a little less about the future and have the resources to do something cool. Less worry about money and...
"LONELINESS..." sighed the third Ghost, materializing in the form of a frail, tired man by my desk. "Loneliness, Isolation, Misunderstanding. Induced by your own hand. Thanks to this." He gestured at the computer monitor. Indeed, the computer had been my main outlet for frustration when I was a kid, looking Chinese in a Chinese society but unable to communicate or participate in it. At some point, I'd angrily said fuck you to that, and withdrew into computer graphics and computer programming. That was a world I could build myself and understand. I think a lot of kids seek that kind of control over something, and it becomes an anchor in an otherwise frustrating world. And when you grow up, that anchor sometimes holds you back.
"DON'T FORGET BEING MISUNDERSTOOD" interjected the Ghost testily, not wanting to lose my attention. "Really, does anyone ever really understood what it is you were looking for? Or why? Or even what you DO? You don't even understand it yourself. You've spent your life chasing interest after interest, looking for that one true passion. Tilting at windmills. Not that you've actually read Don Quixote, but you know what I mean. I should know. I'm you."
"WE'RE ALL YOU!" said the Ghosts in unison, manifesting together in an impressive display of synchronous materialization. But instead of being pleased with this observation, they looked pretty pissed-off.
"Being you sucks!" whined the Ghost of Slothfulness. "Why do I even get up in the morning? It's not worth it! I'm not even a real Ghost yet...I'm an intern! I'm not even supposed to be here today!"
"I would concur with your first statement..." replied the Ghost of Talentlessness, "if not the latter. Regarding your internship: you put in your dues, then if HR says you're a good match for our Organization, you can qualify for a position pending a two-year probationary evaluation period. It is the system, and it is good. Shut the hell up and get us some coffee and danish. We're stuck with this doofus"---he gestured curtly in my direction---"we might as well get comfortable."
"I told my manager I don't like working with other ghosts, and he still teamed me up with these guys." sighed the Ghost of Loneliness to no one in particular. He paused, brightening slightly. "Maybe if there were more women ghosts in the Organization...you know, cute ones wearing those wispy ethereal robes that cinch in just under the..." He startled from his reverie, fixing me with an accusing eye before coldly continuing. "You know what I mean, bachelor boy."
"YEAH...HE DOES." said the other Ghosts in unison. And they stood there, glowering at me. It was all my fault. All mine.
Why didn't I feel bad though? I started off feeling pretty crappy, but now I actually feel kind of good. The Ghosts looked markedly irritated at my good humor, which only added to it.
"It's because you already know what you need to do." said a tinkly voice, "You have always known it. It's not the specifics that necessarily matter, but the way you live and make your decisions and take care of yourself. You're already doing it."
I turned around, and beheld a female spirit, with smile crinkles tickling the corners of her eyes. The Ghost of Loneliness hid behind the Ghost of Talentlessness, who himself was clearly unsure how to handle this breach of protocol. The Ghost of Slothfulness just stared, mouth ajar.
"Who the hell are you?" I demanded. "Did the Organization send you? What do you want?"
"N/A, nope, and nothing!" she chirped. "I am an independent agent. Hope, optimism, believing in good stuff happening, etc. All the good stuff. Yeah!" She beamed.
"Awesome!" I said with growing excitement. "So are you going to melt these other Ghosts away with blasts of HAPPY POWER?" The male Ghosts turned a shade grayer at the suggestion, and huddled closer together.
"No no no, that's not how it works!" she laughed. "Those guys are part of you, and they're part of what makes you a motivated individual. You don't want to be them, so you learn how to face them, even integrate some of what they're saying. Maybe they're even necessary for a balanced life. Besides, all you really need to remember is One Thing." The spirit grinned wickedly, relishing the drama of the moment.
"One thing? Like in City Slickers? They never actually said what it was!"
"No, no, it's simple."
"Cool! What is it?"
"That's it. It's Simple."
"It's Simple?"
"It's Simple. Period!"
"I'm not sure I understand." I said after a long minute. "I'm a pretty complex person, very 'meta'. I like thinking of complexity and systems and stuff. Simplicity isn't my bag."
"Give it a try and see what happens." She smiled. "It's not always complicated." And with that, she winked away in a puff of positive energy.
I'm still trying to figure it out what "It's Simple" means, but I'm beginning to feel that there's something to it that makes sense. One intepretation is that "simple" refers to "taking a single step". It might also mean "making that one commitment". Or maybe it's "focus on your strengths". Or maybe it's just a philosophy of doing that underlies a productive mentality. Like Occam's Razor, applied to life choices? But if I analyze it too much, that sort of defeats the purpose of the "simple" approach.
Maybe it will come to me next time I dream.
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