Bonnie Cook – Design Musings

This week has been the point in my research where I have reached the epiphany that I am organically a part of what i’m researching. It sounds cliche but what I mean by this is that I am realizing that my research and practice in design begs to a reinvention of my communication methodology with the user directly and through my design. It is sort of humorous that I feel surrounded by my research topic suddenly, when at the beginning of this quarter, I had no real grasp of the caliber of how thoroughly design narrative/storytelling has already been covered.

I’ve discovered since an abundance of resources from interviews to blogs to published articles that delve into the importance of storytelling within all of the design disciplines (architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design). It is like I have been awakened to a world that I have been sleepwalking through in some respects. Even books that I have read have references to this topic that I am now able to use (since I am geared toward finding them directly). An example is Tim Brown’s Change By Design text. There is an entire chapter devoted to the importance of storytelling in design thinking and how we better connect as organizations internally and outward into the world through educating in this way.

Even my personal experiences feel more sensitive to the research. For the past two days, i’ve been in a conference about Web Strategy and have found myself dissecting how people say something as much as what they’re saying. The individuals that explain complex concepts through stories are better understood by the others and find agreed upon solutions quicker than those who present their needs/findings in a way that feels like an amoeba of information.

Research has been something different than what I anticipated for this project. It is as much a discovery of what I already think/do as it is abstract ideas beyond myself. The research I have collected thus far has only widened my concept map ten fold. I find myself worried that I won’t be able to find some incredible novel idea to argue in the next part of this class (the research paper). It’s like i’m in a current of information, swimming along with it at a very fast pace trying to reach something new. Below are some of the articles I have found recently that may be of interest to other class members (ones that I most likely won’t be using in my limited literature review based on their CRAAP credibility), or just what they are generally (events, etc…)

http://uxstorytellers.blogspot.com/

http://uxstorytelling.co.il/en

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/29/better-user-experience-using-storytelling-part-one/

http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/32817/

As I spend this week constructing my outline and collecting for the presentation, I’m trying to wrangle all of the research and figure out what I can ask from it. Since there are so many UX storytelling resources, I want to take the reason for telling in that form (for users contemporary short attention spans) and apply that into the rest of the design field as I believe that all aspects of our discipline can benefit from this type of design tool in practice.