On the topic of Stories, Design and Remote Facilitation.
Why a Storytelling Workshop for a team of space designers?
Cheil MDLab works translating brand messages into physical spaces. The goal for this year is to develop projects that work under the principle of Transmedia Storytelling.
The industry of fairs and exhibitions demands creative agencies to have teams that quickly adapt trends and technologies in their design proposals. Furthermore, brands need to understand how physical spaces integrate media platforms to engage customers in meaningful experiences and interactions.
As a starting point, our team is seeking to understand what Storytelling is and why is it useful when designing brand spaces.
Architects, space, and visual designers believe Storytelling is the most effective way to convey messages to a specific audience. Stories are memorable, emotional and an effective communication tool but: How can we transfer that specific narrative principle to our creative process? How can we become better storytellers and create experiences that are compelling and inspirational?
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One of the biggest challenges to translate brand messages into space is to define the Core Message, a spatial principle that organises the elements for visitors to explore and interact with the space.
The creative process is often challenging and exhausting. Brands are demanding creative teams to come up with storylines that are cohesive, catchy, innovative, and that allows them to build meaningful relationships with their customers.
The art of conveying the right message to a specific audience requires to build skills in the communication design level. As a team, we need to understand the strategies behind marketing campaigns and bring the principles of crafting compelling messages to our projects.
What was the content of the workshop?
Beyond the obvious, a book written by Ole Tillman, was my starting point to shape the content of this workshop.
There is a lot to learn from people who craft messages for public presentation speakers. In the stage, the time is limited, the audience needs to be engaged during the whole talk and the visuals need to support the verbal narrative. In this scenario, speakers have very few minutes to catch the audience’s attention, engage, and deliver a message. The speech needs to be rehearsed and the words of the script need to be carefully chosen.
This book is essential for teams who want to learn how to create core messages. It combines the principles of Human Center Design and Business Storytelling covering a broad range of Storytelling theory, tools, and resources that are helpful for anyone who is aiming to communicate ideas in a better a more clear way.
Design is Storytelling, a book written by Ellen Lupton was the perfect match to Ole’s book.
Ellen is the curator of the Copper Hewitt Design Museum. Her approach is closer to what we do in the agency. She understands how the principles of Storytelling can be applied when designing spaces. Ellen defines space designers as Storytellers. Professionals that are in charge to invite people to enter a scene and explore what is there to touch, wonder, move, and perform.
The book is divided into three acts: Action, Emotion, and Sensation. Each of the acts addresses specific tools that help designers overcome the challenges when creating a spatial experience.
What did we do in the workshop?
The workshop was a combination of theory and practical exercises.
In the beginning, we discuss stories that we remembered and analyse the reasons that made those stories stick in our minds. Then, we had a warm-up exercise in which we reflect on the impact that Storytelling has when designing spaces.
We jumped into the theoretical part of Ole’s book. We learned about the history of Storified Presentations and analyse a case study: The opening keynote of the developer event of Google I/O. We learned the elements of a story, the narrative components, and the rhetorical devices that will help us back up our message.
Furthermore, we dive deep into one of the most famous narrative principles: The Hero’s Journey. This narrative was first identified by mythologist Joseph Campbell in an attempt to discover the structure of folk histories all around the world. It is very common in our own popular stories as depicted, especially, in filmmaking. We learned the 12 steps of this principle by analysing the inspiring TED talk of Aimee Mullins.
From the practical tools we explore the five-step structure to build presentations that carry a clear message and the Core Message Sheet, a three-step template that allows designers to reflect on the message they want to communicate to their audience.
The second part of the workshop covered the tools from Ellen’s book.
We analyse the case study of a successful marketing campaign for a mattress brand. As a complement of a previous workshop I have held for the same team, I introduced tools from the Design Thinking approach: Personas and Customer Journey Maps. These tools are crucial when designing engaging experiential spaces. In our creative process, we always need to understand the audience we are talking to and the tools from HCD are indispensable for this process.
The practical exercise consisted in using the tools of the workshop to create a compelling story of the personal journey of becoming an architect. We had a sharing session in which we enjoy learning how our boss has become an architect and his learnings along the journey. Some members of the team were very creative, writing songs, and using rhetorical devices to communicate their message.
Conclusion
This is the first step in a long journey of training and preparing the team to become Spatial Storytellers.
Understanding the theory and the narrative principles builds a fundamental base that allows the team to transfer knowledge from the communication design field to the spatial one.
Every project is now an opportunity to create stories that carry meaningful messages and that help us to understand in a better way what a Transmedia Storytelling principle is.
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Mural and the Remote Facilitation
COVID had changed the dynamics of co-creation and workshop facilitation. It pushed the boundaries of technology and challenged professionals to transfer real facilitation dynamics into the digital world.
Personally, this was the challenge I was waiting for since the pandemic started. I was craving to run this workshop online, to design a Mural template and explore all the digital tools to guide my team through this journey.
I started by documenting myself with articles, Youtube videos, Mural tutorials, and learning from every experience that colleagues were having in their organisations.
The best article I found regarding this topic was this one by Workshopper from AJS:
Then, I jumped into creating the MURAL board to host the session. I have used MURAL before but I have never explored the set of tools they offer to the facilitator. I tried to bring all the interactive features of the platform into my workshop: voting sessions, drawing sessions, and individual working stations.
The best Mural feature is the Outline. A tool that allows the facilitator to group sections of the MURAL and listed them in order so that the group navigate easily through the content.
The best tip from the Workshopper article was to activate the content as you move on into the Mural (the option is embedded in the Outline feature). This help participants to not get lost or feel overwhelmed by the amount of information the facilitator is sharing.
Moreover, it is crucial for the facilitator to set up the physical and digital working space before starting the session. For the physical space, it is important to organise your desk with the things to host the session: notes, post-its, agenda, etc. For the digital working space, keep your computer's desktop as clean as possible, keep only the necessary tab windows open, close applications you are not using during the sessions (e.g, e-mail notifications). This will help you to switch between platforms easily and have zero distractions while hosting the session.
As long as you have all the material ready and an organised navigation system in your computer you will get through the pressure of holding a remote workshop.
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Feel free to start a discussion, I will be happy to join the conversation.
Till then, keep sharing, keep facilitating sessions, and enjoying your work as a designer!
