Reasons for Stories
Storytelling
reasons for stories:
empathize
convey experience over time
convey experiene across situations/journeys
involvement of various stakeholders
share same “thing” from various points of views
to convey qualitative aspects
to provide context (now or future)
to make “it” memorable- Stories you can’t wait to tell
evocative details
how ideas spread
encapsulate intent
“essentialize”
Making it live
convey personalities & attitudes
Pulling out stories from users (Needfinding?)
Questions that promote stories of context & usage
Experience Story Firsthand
Tools:
+ behavorial archaeology: evidence of people’s activites inherent in placement, wear patterns, and organization of places and things
+ cross cultural comparisions: personal or published accounts reveal differences in behaviors and artiacts
+ guided tours: project-revelvant spaces and activites
+ personal inventory: catalog evidence of user’s lifestyle
+ shadowing: tag along with people to observe and understand their day-to-day routines, interactions, and contexts
+be your customer: ask client to enact typical customer’s experience (say vs. do)
+ Camera journal
+ narration in action
+ day in the life (of user/ or object)
+ user collage (significance in images and arrangements)
+ draw the experience
+ cognitive maps
Build story to iteriate on current and future context
Noun story as an iterated concept/ prototyping medium (product is embodied by increasingly insightful context)
Tools:
+ Experience prototype: quickly prototype a concept and use it to learn from a simulation of the experience using the product
+ role-playing: identify the stakeholders involved and assign roles to members of team
+ scenario testing: series of card depicting possible future scenarios and share with users to get reactions
+ Bodystorming: Set up a scenario and act outroles focusing on the intuitive responses prompted by the physical enactment
+ Still-photo survey: capture pictures of specific objects, activites
+ behavioral sampling: give people a pager or phone and ask them to record and evaluate the situation they are in when it rings (product/services integrate into people’s routines)
Materials:
+ storyboards/cartooning (iterating a story visually & quickly)
+ improv techniques (with circumstance specific context)
exercises:
+ covey same story plot in various mediums i.e. video, skit, bodystormed, storyboard (see what additional insights each medium can reveal)
+ warm up exercise: have everyone convey a love poem about a certain object or experience. figure out what is inhibiting creative ability (i.e. fear of something) and how to get over that hurdle (see Jim Adams?).
+ create a short blurb of what each user, material, device in a situation would say (i.e. cautious doctor, one-to-one doctor, busy patent, blocking stone, bleeding ureter wall, doctor’s eyeball, sneaky laser lithotriipser; see Rolf Faste’s Notes)
Synthesize (construct stories) + retell story (convey stories)
verb get to insight (same as “build story to iterate”?)
Noun convey insight
Tools:
+ character profiles/composite characters
+ informance: role-playing insights or behaviors acted out in an “informative performance”
+ scenarios: illustrate a character-rich story line describing the contect of use
+ long range forecasts: scenarios that describe social and/or technological trends influence on people’s behavior and use of product
materials:
+ clips of well constructed stories: i.e. seinfield
+ good stories presented well (see
+ Paul harvet AM810 & garrison keiller: compelling radio storytellers
+ John seeley brown: technology storyteller (wrote Storytelling in organizations)
Exercise:
+ create a life size composite character (create a video conveying the details of his/her life as related to design project)
+ have a team explore ideas (based off of field observations) through bodystorming and take the best ones to create a scenario. Each team acts out their scenario and it is videotaped. there is a class debrief about the lessons gained from each scenario.