Directed Storytelling

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It is said that design is to communicate some sort of meaning to an audience. Meaning-making for designers is visual story telling. In the reading the author talks about ethnography which by definition is qualitative research method often used in the social sciences, particularly in anthropology and in sociology (wikapedia.org). In order to successfully create meaning, one must conduct solid research or have great intuition and personal experience in regards to the meaning they are trying to convey. Directed storytelling essentially is collectively listening to an experience from a group of people all together and finding common patterns between these stories.

In directed story telling there must be three types of people: the person sharing their experience as a storyteller, a facilitator of discussion in order to guide the storyteller in the right direction in giving pertinent information and the final person is the recorder documenting the story. Although, the more people documenting the more comprehensive the collection of data can be and thus yield higher success rates in meaning-making. The documenter will write down ideas in summation and of course these ideas will be subjective to the documenter.

I wasn’t too fond of the Blackboard section of this reading as it can be easily summed up to be the site was poorly designed. The students thought it was designed for teachers and teachers thought it was designed for students. The designers found out the needs of both the students and teachers and then implemented these needed changes.

Gift giving was more interesting as the results from the survey given in Europe and America were near identical in the sense that when one person wants to give a gift to someone else, it takes them a while as they must put thought into whether or not the gift is a good “fit” for the recipient. After the decision is made, the person giving felt good about their decision. The reading says “recurring storylines included descriptions of personality, timeliness and emotion.” From this they concluded the designers needed a store “more sensitive to people’s feelings about gift-giving.” Although this wasn’t a surprise, it put further into scope the importance of this concept for the designers.

It should be noted that directed story telling is useful only for time-bounded experiences such as “when was the last time you went camping?” and not useful for the opposite. I think the reading was just like the gift-giving example where I always knew it was important to hear it directly from an audience and use this as a way to communicate to them but it’s a good reiteration of just really how important it is.