Example Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge and Selection Storytelling is a great tool that I use all the time. However, a wonderful  teacher taught me how to use storytelling, thereby turning my design  thinking upside down. I am studying to be a designer at the university.  In the new academic year, I have a new subject – animation. It was very  interesting for me to try drawing cartoons, but at the same time I was  afraid to do it and did not know where to start. To help me come up with  the story I want to show in animation, my teacher started telling stories  from her experience, and she shared stories from her life to help me use  them in the context of my story. As I understand now, she did this in  order for me to understand my interests and determine my goal - what I  want to talk about in the cartoon.

Application Visualization and other ways of design thinking didn’t work for me. They  only made me feel anxious and uncomfortable. At first I tried to come up  with an incredible story about a dolphin, but the pictures popping up in  my head told me that I could not cope. Then I decided to write the story  that comes from the heart. This unconscious story later became a huge  project that won first place in the student cartoon competition.

Insight Having achieved such success, I realized that design thinking is impor- tant not only for study and work, but also for life in general. Storytelling  helps you take a personal approach, come up with a good story, and re- duce anxiety. Storytelling is the first stage in work, so there is no need  to run ahead and be afraid, you need to do it now, and in the future  everything will turn out as it should.

Approach I think the next time I run into a similar problem, I’ll try combining sto- rytelling and visualization to try and achieve better results.

