Sunday, 17 March 2013

Storytelling as a Communication Tool


Some thought on the paper Spicing up public journeys – storytelling as a design strategy

As the title suggests, this paper is about the use of storytelling in service design and, more specifically, designing urban public experiences. 2 uses for storytelling are described; gathering and creating stories, and for creating concept ideas. 

An example explains how the Ritz hotel chain use storytelling to communicate the brand philosophy and culture to all of their hotels through an engaging story. The stories are not specific to different hotels, rather they convey the brand identity and allow interpretation by the individual hotels based on their own environment and context. The stories were communicated by photograph workbooks. This is an example of creating a story to visually demonstrate to internal staff what the organisation is about and the image and culture which it wants the user to experience. The staff are the vehicle for delivering the service and hence play an important role in the users service experience.

The author explains 3 reasons to use storytelling in design:
  1. Collecting stories from the user to gather information and to inspire.
  2. Using story telling methods such as story boarding to prototype often intangible services.
  3. Designing touch-points to create user experiences.

Visualising plays a big part in service design. This is probably because services can be intangible and often there is no physical product or artifact included in the service. So capturing user experiences by illustrating them makes the service feel tangible and evokes emotion which is why storytelling is a great way to prototype services and design user experiences. 

No comments:

Post a Comment