Narratives in Design

This is the English language version of an article I wrote for the Brazilian Magazine iDeia Design,volume 1 of 2018, p.60–64, which is in turn based on the following academic papers:

Grimaldi, S. (2020) ‘Narratives in design toolkit’, Journal of Design Research, 18(3–4), pp. 113–136. doi:10.1504/JDR.2020.115939. (available here: https://www.academia.edu/50154541/Narratives_in_design_toolkit)

Grimaldi, S. (2018) Design for Narrative Experience in Product Interactions. University of the Arts London. (available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332045875_Design_for_Narrative_Experience_in_Product_Interaction_PhD_Thesis_University_of_the_Arts_London)

Grimaldi, S., Fokkinga, S. and Ocnarescu, I. (2013) ‘Narratives in Design: A Study of the Types, Applications and Functions of Narratives in Design Practice’, in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces. New York, NY, USA: ACM (DPPI ’13), pp. 201–210. doi: 10.1145/2513506.2513528 (available here https://www.academia.edu/4506199/Narratives_in_Design_a_study_of_the_types_applications_and_functions_of_narratives_in_design_practice).

reposted from my own Medium blog here: https://medium.com/@s.grimaldi/narratives-in-design-42298f1ed5bc 

Stories, narratives, and storytelling strategies are used more and more in product design and across design disciplines.

Narratives are commonly used within the design process. Product designers use narrative tools such as user diaries, user ethnographies, cultural probes, personas and scenarios in order to conduct meaningful user research, communicate user insights across a design team, build empathy with their target market, imagine future contexts and to stimulate the design team’s creativity.

Objects often come with accompanying narratives, for example when someone keeps a family heirloom because of the associated stories of their grandparents, or when an object is kept as a reminder of an event, such as a souvenir from a trip. Those objects were at the right place at the right time, or just happened to survive the test of time, and come to represent those people or those moments.

Other accompanying narratives are deliberately constructed around an object, for example brand narratives and advertising. By wearing a particular brand of shoes, the user remembers and embodies the brand values around luxury or thinks of themselves as having an active lifestyle.

A less common way in which stories feature in product design is through the narratives that the objects themselves convey through their use. For example, in critical and speculative design, designers create ambiguous or provocative objects with the aim to make the user reflect on broader issues, such as ethics or cultural codes. By showing realistic artefacts that appear to belong to dystopian futures, for example, designers create empathy with characters in fictional scenarios.

Some objects use narrative to convey something to the user through the sequence of events in the use of the product. For example, interaction designers sometime structure the user’s experience over time through a series of events that are experienced in sequence, similar to how events are structured in a story. This is a strategy that is used in design of digital products or interfaces to guide the user experience, but is rarely used deliberately in the design of non-digital products, despite having great potential.

Experiences happen over time, including experiences that involve design artefacts; narrative is the way in which people organise their understanding of time-based events. Designers could use narrative techniques to understand and envision how the experience of a product may unfold over time, and understand how users may interpret specific details of their design or its overall features.

For example, when using a chair, the user sees the chair, decides to sit on it, approaches it, pulls it out from under the table, sits down, maybe scoots forward to adjust their position, etc. Thinking of this process of use can help designers to envision which of these steps they might design or engage with and how this could shape the story and interpretation of that interaction. Designers could decide to work on the overall look of the chair, or on the texture of the back rail that is gripped when pulling it out, or on the feeling the user gets when they sit down, or any combination of these elements. Changing some of these details could create experiences with meanings that are discovered through sequences of these elements.

Narratives carry meaning and emotion, and information presented in narrative form is more likely to engage an audience, resonate with people, cause emotions and empathy, and be remembered. Narratives are also particularly good at making people reflect, at showing values, and at stimulating the imagination. If for example the visual aspect of a chair differs from its tactile aspects, a story is created, where the user expected a certain experience, and after using the object was surprised to find something different; it is a story of surprise or unexpectedness.

Narratives are a natural way to communicate ideas and stimulate imagination beyond functional purposes, and creating engaging and memorable experiences. This is particularly relevant because product designers are very good at articulating what their design is for, what function it fulfills, but have more difficulty articulating what that design is about, how it is interpreted and what it communicates to the user through its use. By focusing on the narrative that the user encounters through using the object, designers can give clues as to what a design is about and plan for how it might be interpreted by a user.

To this end, I’m developing a toolkit to help designers identify, articulate and manipulate narrative aspects of their design work. The toolkit breaks down the user experience of artefacts into steps that happen through time and prompts the designer to think what elements in this experience might create narratives for the user, what effect these might have, and how they build up to a coherent story of use.

This toolkit reinforces the idea that all details of the design and of the user experience communicate to the user, and helps to focus design choices in terms of designer-user communication. It also encourages designers to keep their focus on the aims of the design, what the design is about, and what effect they want to create in the user.

This helps designers and design students to envision and engage with the user experience of their design, from the user’s point of view, envisioning the potential experience of the user with the object and how this might be interpreted and remembered as a story by the user.