Design Is Storytelling

FROM THE BOOK

I first heard the maxim “Design is problem solving” when I was an art student at The Cooper Union in New York City. It was the early 1980s—long before Photoshop and digital fonts overtook the page. Problem solving taught me that designers use simple forms to convey compact messages. The signage system used in New York City’s subway was—and is—a brilliant work of problem solving. Designers Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda deployed bold sans serif type and bright dots of color to unify a network of deteriorating stations. The system, implemented in 1970 after years of research, is easy to understand and inexpensive to maintain. Problem solved, four decades and counting.

The MTA’s signage system tells you more, however, than where to find the A train. When the signs appeared in 1970, those crisp white letters and sharp dots of color announced a new language of rational communication. The signs didn’t just solve a problem; they embodied ideas and principles. They celebrated the subway’s transition from a collection of competing subway lines to a government-owned public authority.

As a student, I wanted to question the limits of design. What does problem solving leave out? What about beauty, feeling, and sensation? What about humor, surprise, and interpretation? I’ve been asking these questions throughout my career as a designer and writer. Working now as a curator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, I marvel at our museum’s diverse collection of artifacts, which includes everything from a subway map by Vignelli to a birdcage shaped like a neo-Gothic cottage. A subway system is a a place where people fall asleep, fall in love, get drunk, get lost, and sometimes take their lives. Trains rumble, platforms murmur, and ads hawk everything from underpants to wrinkle cream. In 2008, Yves Béhar designed a line of free condoms inspired by New York’s subway signs (distributed by the city’s health department). Applied to condom packaging, the subway’s colorful dots represent a city where people move about and freely mingle, a place of love and danger. Béhar practices human-centered design, a methodology that combines rational problem solving and emotional storytelling.

This book is about storytelling and design. So what is a story, and what is design? Stories depict action and stimulate curiosity. A story can be shorter than a limerick or longer than an epic poem. Design uses form, color, materials, language, and planning to transform the meaning of everything from transit signs and web apps to shampoo bottles and retail spaces. Design embodies values and illustrates ideas. It delights, surprises, and sometimes manipulates. Whether crafting an interactive product or a data-rich publication, designers invite people to enter a scene and explore what’s there. Design Is Storytelling explores the psychology of visual communication from a narrative point of view. Human beings actively seek and create patterns as we navigate the world— and we feel delight, surprise and sometimes frustration when patterns break. Storytelling can help your products and communications pulse with energy.

Design Is Storytelling is a playbook for creative thinking. The tools and concepts presented here are geared to the increasingly dynamic, user-focused eld of design practice. On the stage of design practice, users are heroes, rooms are stage sets, buttons are calls to action, and color palettes are links to rich multisensory experiences. Some of the ideas we’ll discuss, such as USER PERSONAS and MATRIX MAPS, have been developed by leading designers and educators, while others, such as AFFORDANCES and SENSORY ANTHROPOLOGY, come from diverse research fields. We’ll also explore concepts used by screenwriters and comedians, such the RULE OF THREES. Throughout the book, graphs, diagrams, lists, word webs, and other methods of creative invention will help you generate emotionally engaging concepts.

Design Is Storytelling unfolds in three acts. Act I, “Action,” explores the patterns that underly nearly every narrative. Designers can use these patterns, from the NARRATIVE ARC to the HERO'S JOURNEY, to think about users’ relationships with products and services. The story of unboxing a gadget or opening a bank account follows a dramatic arc with highs and lows, anticipation and suspense. Design is an art of planning ahead and predicting possible futures. SCENARIO PLANNING encompasses a range of tools for imagining unknown situations and possible futures.

Act II, “Emotion,” looks at how design can bring people joy and comfort. No one is happy all the time. Designing for emotion means recognizing a fuller range of human experience and accounting for feelings of sadness, frustration, and anger as well as humor, delight, and surprise.

Act III, “Sensation,” focuses on perception and cognition. Stories hinge on action, and so, too, does human perception. Principles such as VISUAL PATH, GESTALT GROUPING, and MULTISENSORY design reveal that perception is a dynamic process of creating order and finding focus. People go to cafés for the coffee, not for the paint colors, yet a room drenched in deep mahogany with top notes of ginger and black currant could make your macchiato taste smoother.

The book wraps up with a set of tools for evaluating your work. The STORY AUDIT asks questions such as, “Where is the call to action?” “How does the project function over time?” “How have you engaged the senses?” “What emotions are you supporting?” These questions will help you nd and amplify the storytelling potential of any project. How you communicate this narrative content matters, too. TIPS FOR WRITING and TIPS FOR PERFORMING will help you convey clear and active stories that clients and stakeholders will understand and enjoy.

Rob Peart, writing in 2017, rejects problem solving as the designer’s definitive act. He seeks to shift attention to the process of design rather than to physical things and xed outcomes. Such a move, he argues, gives designers “the freedom to think beyond the nail-shaped problems we’ll gure out how to bang with our particular hammer; we stop looking at the world as one big design problem to be solved, and instead see it as a bunch of avenues waiting to be explored and challenged.” To do that requires developing rich creative processes and learning how to communicate about them.

This is a book about design processes and how to talk about them. Designers use stories to stir emotions and quell uncertainty, to illustrate facts and sway opinion. The stories designers tell may be less momentous than a Greek tragedy, but they make routine tasks more legible and rewarding. The act of using a stapler or buying a bus ticket builds and crests over time, supported along the way with sounds, sights, and feedback. Roadblocks and obstacles mar the experience and slow us down (bent staples, rejected credit cards, invasions of privacy). Each scene in these everyday dramas can be pleasurable or frustrating, depending on how the experience has been constructed.