There is no greater power on this earth than STORY...

Story telling is a recollection of experience. It is a means of passing on information. It takes timing, delivery and personality. It creates nostalgia. Storytellers, good storytellers, are few and far between.

Storytelling used to be a way of life, and to some extent it still is…

Every time we communicate with one another there is often an experience recounted to entertain, to explain something or simply in attempt to teach us something new. These days we don’t necessarily consider historians as storytellers like we did their predecessors that we had long ago, the Seanchaí. These people were renowned for telling stories of the places they had been or of the myths and legends that are large part of the Irish culture.

“We are all storytellers. We live in a network of stories. There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.”

- Jimmy Neil Smith

Storytelling is not just an Irish thing as much as it might be believed because, ‘by god we do love a good chat’, (well most of us anyway). No, Storytelling is a universal human tool.

Absolutely everything is, or has a story.

Now that statement may be viewed by many as controversial, and they would be correct. Everyone has their own opinions formed from their own experiences all of which make up their individual stories. As a person everyone has a story, because we experience things, but what about an object. “A laptop doesn’t have a story because it is an inanimate thing!” I might ask that person, well how did it come to be? How did you get it? And they will probably come back to me with something along the lines of “I went to the shop and I bought it.” Not the most exciting story ever to exist but a story none the less.

BUT WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR DESIGN?

“Story telling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.”

- Robert McKee

I use story as a means of communication. For me it is a way to connect with the people I encounter everyday through college, clubs and societies or even just on the street. Not in the slightest does that make me a storyteller. I can’t write a story to save my life, no matter how many times the structure and the key things to include are thrown at me in education. However it does mean I can understand people a lot better than ever before.

“Story telling offers the opportunity to talk with our audience, not at them.”

- Laura Holloway

We, as designers, will spend huge quantities of time engaging with others through their experiences, their stories, to see how we can bring their, and our own, ideas to life. It is used in every aspect of our process from the discovery of a problem, all the way through to marketing a solution we came up with.

The stories we tell literally make up the world around us. This is the power of story, a universally understood thing that is so often overlooked.