My Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

I find storytelling to be a very compelling tool for many situations which require design thinking. As  an architecture student, I often find myself facing a variety of problems in design briefs, ranging  from personal preferences to geographical differences and even environmental concerns. I spend a  lot of time concerning myself with the story of a place. I am concerned with how people interact  inside a space, and how the space, in turn, interacts with other spaces around it. In design  competitions and other situations where I am designing for clients, I often have discussions with  them at length, or survey groups that belong to a particular target group that I’m designing for (e.g.  young professionals, young families, college-age students, etc.) in order to understand their  background and their wants and needs. I therefore find that storytelling is very appropriate as a  selection for my design challenge.

Application

When we are working on group projects or working together towards a design competition, we do a  lot of discussion. We may design individually, but then we come together and we analyse the spaces.  Especially when different people are assigned the design of different areas of a space (e.g. I get the  bedroom, my teammates work on the bathroom, living room, and kitchen in a house respectively),  we like to talk about how the potential or future inhabitants may use the space. We tell stories,  about how a person might move from one space to another, and how they will inhabit it. We want  to make sure that there is a logical flow to the layout and it is a comfortable place to live, designed  intentionally for certain types of use. Suppose my team and I are designing a suburban house in a  well-to-do, middle-class, up-and-coming neighbourhood. Then we might tell a story about a  potential client is a family with a high school student who is a competitive swimmer who comes  home in the afternoon and practices in the pool in his backyard, and plant trees and place the pool  in an appropriate location relative to the site so that it is in the shaded during the afternoons.

Insight & Approach

Applying the storytelling tool to my thinking was very helpful for me, because it forces me to not just  focus on the aesthetics or what my personal opinion of a space is, but rather, encourages me to  think about additional considerations that some other people with a different way of life as mine  might think or feel or act when encountered with such a space. This helped me a lot with personal  projects when I was designing things, and so we had a conversation about this as a group during one  of the meetings when we were working on a submission for an architectural design competition.  And it really helped foster a lot of creativity and innovation. I think as far as approaching things  differently, my only issue would be not getting too caught up in the crazy, or inventive stories, and  really focusing on the real, mainstream ones that seem reasonably appropriate for the situation.

