So, Why Do Design Researchers Need to Be Storytellers?

The Boyhood of Raleigh by Sir John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1870.

Storytelling is big now, but why?

Essentially, if we put together what all these books, white papers, and company blog posts are saying, what we find is that stories give everything around us meaning- like the underlying theme in a story…. design is the part you don't see, but the part that makes the whole story worth while.

And, if this is true, then the job of the design researcher is to capture that meaning (by researching, understanding, and effectively communicating the characters, context, and plot of a product or service), to find where and when to add or remove meaning (minimizing bad experiences or give complicated ones a clear path) and ensure that the most essential parts of the story are carried on within new designs.

These bits of qualitative information are worth more than telling a designer where to put a button or how often a customer will use a product. …every bit as important as telling them where to put a button as why to put it there.

Innovation
Like any good story, design requires an editor- someone with a deep understanding of the theme, the reader, and knowledge of how they'll track to each other through the story. Editors help a story along, asking the writer for more bits where they're needed, cutting unnecessary plot points, and in helping to encourage the writer to take certain directions. Editors are an impartial set of eyes- they are liaisons, arbiters, if you will, between the reader and the writer- as so are design researchers between the designer and the user.

Testing
After research inspires innovation, one needs to test it, then gather the new stories to make sure that the design is effectively recreating an optimal experience for a variety of users. These new stories are just as important as the old ones, as they can find problems before they become expensive mistakes.

Stories in Design: When to (And Not to) Tell One

Earlier today, we were trying out our new system in the office, and tried to push the screen from an iPad to the TV. Although we all knew that it was possible, only one of us knew how easy it was. Had he not known the way to access the right button, our office story of Apple's ease would have been one of frustration and confusion.

I dare say that Apple's success is not it's magically intuitive design, but how easy it is to share the stories of how to use the product. How a lack of a user manual forces people to ask each other how to use it, and how a user feels as though they own the product after figuring out how to get email on their phone.

No manual means easter egg stories from a co-worker who tells you that the thing your holding has always had a button you never knew existed…. no manual allows the user to grow into a product without the overload.

No manual also means fewer words, and as any researcher can tell you, when every company has their own word for the same thing, words can hurt as much as they help. Our need to control our environment sometimes keeps us from actually interacting with it. So. How does this relate to story? If the button means nothing without the story behind it, how is it that not telling the user about the button can work?

What apple has done in removing the manual, is removed the jargon…..allowed the user to create their own story, mapping out the functions of their products that are most often used in obvious ways and listening to heavy users, creating hidden keys… a story to dive deeper into for those who choose to do so.

Apple has created a game, letting anyone start at level one- and enabling long time users to stretch their Mac skills- all but forcing new users to ask veterans how to do something only reinforces the game.

The question, now, is what happens when everyone knows how to use an apple?

Memes

When an obsession with memes and Ted Talks intersect, no one is safe. From Dan Denett's concept of the "human" ant that is inexplicably drawn into danger by the "virus" of ideals, to Susan Blackmore's telling story of a world of memes waiting to enter our brains, the meme has corrupted my extracurricular thoughts.

Since watching W.H. Whyte's Study of Small Urban Spaces, when I began studying design research, I've taken a behavioral and cognitive psychological approach to groups. Fact is, I've been known to find watching people more exciting than movies: the social mimicry of man is fascinating on all levels.

Who cannot find themselves enamored with Don Norman?

Recently, however, I've combined the idea of social group connections with the concept of a designer's role in communication.

Understanding how animals (like crows) can quickly interpret and adapt to patterns, and how such reasoning methods that we identify as intelligence might actually be easily broken down to simple (almost robotic) trial and error processes could help designers reinterpret web navigation, group-based systems and new products.

I feel, now, like a Buddah, displaced and yet a part of everything around me. "What is" is not good or bad, just the act of happening...

We, life organisms, love taking-in information- especially in visual form (from great minds like Hans Rosling and David McCandless)! What else can we say of the recent data viz. craze that has come as a direct result of society's desire to make sense of the ever-growing and easily accessible database made available to us through the web?!

What new discoveries about how we speak to each other can come about, when we break down human interaction to its most basic natural principles?

Perhaps, Ted will tell me. Perhaps, I will tell Ted.

Draw

This is beautiful.

Aesthetics

The ability to define true beauty has been at debate, surely, as long as humans have had the words to do so. From ancient Greece, to modern philosophy, Western society has always had an obsession with pinning down why one thing (be it visual or lyrical art) is more aesthetically pleasing than another.
The debate about whether one even has the ability to do so goes even deeper into the human psyche. Can beauty be defined? If so, are humans capable of defining it within the language we currently possess? The problem with such questions is that they are posed to corner a response into a “yes” or “no”- as if such words could really be complex enough to answer a question so large and vague.
Positively, if one merely observes what he or she can see in the world, we can define beauty. Each of us has, at one time or another, chosen the word to define an object or idea- whether it really meant inspiration, as in Plato’s Ion, or not, it happens, and thus, we can say it is so. The debate, then, is whether beauty can be defined universally.
Such a goal would imply that the universe abides by the same standards that we humans measure it out into. (As in, an inch exists outside of a human calling it so.) I do not think it does.
Let us first say that because the human mind works in comparisons- one thing is better than another- that beauty would not exist in a world without the “not beautiful” (the ugly). Next, let us acknowledge that this definition is entirely dependent on human perspective, which has not yet consumed all of the knowledge of the universe, and thus all of the knowledge of the “not beautiful” and/or beautiful is still in the process of being known by us humans. Finally, placing human existence in time, where we are capable of experiencing only a miniscule amount of the universe’s beauty or ugliness before the opportunity has passed us by for the next moment, puts us in no position to assert any definition of universal beauty- just as we would think it silly for a child to determine the planning of a city based on what he sees from his bedroom window in an evening!
The question left is now whether beauty exists.
As I have posed before, the question of beauty is one side of a comparison between what Hume would say is what the mind defines as pleasing or not (which is totally abstract, inconstant between individuals, and often changing within individual minds) and little more. [At least, under the circumstances that we humans were given to examine the term.]
I know, upon introspection, only this: I find things beautiful and I find things ugly. There are times when others agree with my opinions about these things and times when they don’t. My opinion about beauty changes over time, and there are times when I can’t even agree with myself about the aesthetics of a work of art, but what I can’t do is stop my mind from trying to sort these works into one or the other- beautiful or not. I am always searching, always sorting.

Designing Media

ack!!!!! Horay!!!

On: Bjorn Again? Rethinking 70s Revivalism through the Reappropriation of 70s Clothing

By Nicky Gregson, Kate Brooks and Louise Crewe

This article covers 2 different reasons that groups in England in the early 90's were adopting 70's clothing and how one side was for play while the other was a symbol, ad advertisement, of one's knowledge and respect for the design. I see in it the hunt of youth for knowledge, respect, and reputation. It was entertaining.