Once upon a time...

Once upon a time in a contemporary design culture class we discussed the art of story telling. This is becoming more relevant at the moment with designers, I think this is because every design must tell its own story in order to draw us in. Story telling is , in my opinion what gives a product its life. It’s almost as if we, as designers, are baptising our products with this tale that it can eventually tell for itself through its functionality and form.

For this class, we split into groups of four and had to carry out story telling exercises. I honestly thought this was so much fun. It seemed for that hour of story-telling, there was no worries, no limits, no judgement and we all could just throw things out there. I loved how I could be as weird as I wanted to be. I think story telling shows a degree of someone’s personality and the fact that everyone’s stories in my group were so different, it proves my point even further. The stories told progressed from something as simple as a black cat to unfolding its journey to another dimension.

We also had to play with story cubes. They were nine dices with different pictures on them. We had to role the dices and come up with a story from what picture was on the cubes. This really improved improvisation and quick-thinking which is also a very useful skill for designers. I always think an effective way to get the brain juices flowing is putting us on the spot of improvisation. I think the whole exercise made me admire people’s different takes on these pictures. Something which I could perceive as a mask on a story cube could be perceived as a false identity symbol for somebody else. As well as this, we each had to start our own story with one sentence and pass around the sheet to the next person. I might have thought a story was going in one direction and it could end up somewhere completely different. It was a very funny exercise and very free flowing.

I also feel as designers, because things can go a little out of our control from time to time. We have to be so comfortable living in chaos. This story telling gives us something we can control to some extent. It’s up to us to tell this story and we can decide how to tell it, where to tell it and be ourselves with it.

One piece of advice I can offer is that if you are ever feeling designers block, a lack of creativity or even just kick-start that brain of yours, start story telling. It could be the craziest story and nobody might ever see it, but it’s your story and you can decide how it goes.