Storytelling & Design
Posted on October 25, 2012 | posted by:
I recently went to a storytelling event hosted by a 12-year-old. – Quite a risky move for a trendy downtown theater. The seasoned audience, being polite, chuckled as the young girl, told stories with great enthusiasm about mundane things: losing an iPhone, calling the “uncool girls” at (what sounded like a school for wealthy privileged kids), “peasants” (the working class), and how upset she was at her father for gifting a duck in her name to a less fortunate family instead of giving her a “real” Christmas present. The young girl referred to herself saying, “I’ve always been a 27 year old at heart.” And if irony was her intention, it fell flat. My freshly-into-her-30’s friend sucked her teeth, rolled her eyes, and then we left early to head for the bar. This encounter made me think about what the writer Fran Leibowitz says about child-prodigy writers: that there are none. You have to know something of life to be intriguing. You need experience to produce something worthwhile.
The same goes for design. Herbert Simon writes, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations, into preferred ones.” John Thacker, along the same lines says, “everyone designs.” But can one “design” without experience, or more importantly to my current situation, can one design well without good training from an excellent school of design? You do need to know something in order to create something of interest and while people may have innate design skills, it doesn’t end there.
Back to our young storyteller and her stories falling flat… despite her enthusiasm, she has yet to hone her craft. She is, after all, only 12. I’m with Thackera and Simon when they say that it is human nature to design. However, I believe that they are referring to when you examine known situations in order to make them ideal for yourself. As a designer you are looking at the known and unknown scenarios and designing for others in order to make their situations ideal. This, I believe, requires more training, and more than that, requires dialogue. In order to create a dialogue, you have to try to really understand your user, situation, or the problem you’re trying to solve. Where do you begin? Talk with a client, read, take photos, sketch, make a prototype, and then make another prototype. For me, learning how to make this design process effective for my own practice took training and time.
For our young storyteller, she was trying to relate to a crowd of twenty and thirty-something’s, a stage of life she has yet to experience. She had designed stories for an audience on assumptions. She assumed that she understood what it was like to be a 27-year-old living in New York City. And to the twenty-something crowd, she did not. Mark Twain said, “Write about what you know.” There is only so much that you can design based on your own experiences and view of the world. The rest would be pure assumptions, and the results could be compromised.
Let’s flip the scenario. Let’s say our storyteller told us all her middle school observations in an engaging way, which would be far more interesting. We would remember with her our own experiences and find humor in them. Or, knowing that her audience would be of a certain age, she could have had someone of that age co-write something for her to perform and that could have been very entertaining.
I’ve spent years designing objects for people, based on assumptions; I’m like a 12-year-old comedian standing on a stage telling stories that I know little about. So, two months in, Transdiciplinary Design is really starting to click. I am honing my skills as a designer, and I am learning the value of dialogue and co-design. Design is better when there are more perspectives, more experiences, and less assumption.