Storytelling for Design and Policy: In conversation with CPI and Portable
By Emily Macloud (Portable), Beth Hyland (Portable), Alli Edwards (CPI), and Jessica Fuller (CPI).
A Bit of Background
The Centre for Public Impact (CPI) is a not-for-profit that supports government, philanthropy, and civil society organisations to reimagine government. Our interest in storytelling stems from a belief that government needs to work better for everyone, and doing this requires not only different ways of doing but different ways of being, listening, and valuing different ways of knowing.
CPI has been working with Dusseldorp Forum and Hands Up Mallee to explore Storytelling for systems change and is currently listening to people to understand what conditions enable stories to be responded to and valued.
Building on this work and several conversations on CPI’s community of practice, a ‘Question and Answer’ session was held with Emily MacLoud and Beth Hyland, senior and lead design strategists with Portable. Portable’s mission is to seek out areas of social need and policy failure and use design and technology as tools to help address challenges. Portable focuses on topics like mental health, justice, and education. In practical terms, this looks like digital products or platforms, but they also do design research, discovering different problems and creating solutions in the offline world.
The session was an opportunity to bring together folks interested in the designerly practice of storytelling in policymaking. This blog highlights key points from the session and answers questions posed by participants.
Watch the recording here: Storytelling in design and policymaking with Portable and CPI
Why Storytelling?
Beth: My interest in storytelling has really come into my work before I fully was aware of it. Empathy and listening, and the need to tune into other people’s stories are core to human-centred design processes. One of the things I’m most interested in is not just the story but all of the meaning that our stories bring with them, and I think that’s part of the reason I’m interested in storytelling as a method for learning and as a method for building shared understanding and change.
Emily: What really got the ball rolling for me was the session run by CPI last year, talking about storytelling for systems change. That broadened my horizons in terms of considering how it’s not just individual stories but actually stories that can join together to start to change the systems we’re embedded within. We have seen at Portable how important it is to be able to tell a story about what we discover on our projects and the change that’s desired. It can often be the bridge between designs being useful, relevant and implemented, and designs falling down the big black hole never to be picked up again.
Alli: You’re both talking about how storytelling helps not only get inspiration from lived experiences but also communicates the impact and value of work. It feels to me like these stories also create a sort of responsibility on our part as someone who has then heard the story and then needs to honour and act upon what we’ve heard, in a way that reading a report or seeing some data might not necessarily carry with it.
What makes a story, a story?
Beth: I think there is an implicit meaning that stories bring with them, and all the emotional reasoning behind the context and what happened and what it meant to that person. So you have to be pretty sensitive when you’re listening to a story, and it’s often good practice to check back that you’re understanding the meaning behind their story well.
I think one of the key differences between qualitative — maybe more dry sorts of information is the emotion and significance attached to it.
“In a world that can sometimes be very rational, a story can actually cut through all of that — there’s all this context and subtlety that gets tied up in the stories. It’s not just a list of facts, it resonates with people and can either confirm or challenge our ideas about the world and what’s possible.”
Stories can be really comforting because there is a rhythm that makes a lot of sense. It starts in a place where we sort of expect, and the tension in the middle resolves itself in a way that’s familiar. But then there are the stories that begin or end in places that are unexpected and I think those stories are some of the most powerful because they challenge us, expand our perceptions and allow us to reason in different ways. I think it’s quite different compared to information or a report that follows a different structure.
Emily: To build on that, I always thought of storytelling as a method of telling, but stories also make sense of the world around us. So stories are both a means of knowing and a method of telling. We tell ourselves stories to make sense of why other people might do what they do, or why a system might operate the way it does.
“Stories are central to our means of communicating with not just others, but also ourselves.”
They can also be used as a way of pulling different threads together to make up a larger story or narrative. They’re not a piece of information disconnected from the world around them, they’re dynamic. The Narrative Initiative uses the metaphor of waves to explain this relationship well.
What we’re still sitting with
Alli: There is so much respect, empathy and trust that is required to create conditions where people are invited and safe to share their stories that I am left wondering if the relational nature of storytelling could shift the field of human-centred design and research. There is a responsibility that comes with being entrusted with others’ stories that, to my mind, doesn’t seem as necessarily inherent to other design methods like journey mapping, focus groups etc. By embracing the ways in which relationships and accountable ways of working are fundamental to this approach, I wonder if storytelling has the potential to help us tell a different story about design.
Beth: Stories are a way to experience the world beyond and within ourselves. They shape and are shaped by, the way we understand the world. Stories provide us with an opportunity to make sense of the world around us. The stories we choose to listen to, understand and share in turn help to create the reality we live in. On a planet of nearly 8 billion people, never have there been so many people or stories, and never has there been so much responsibility to be discerning and purposeful about how we engage with the world of stories.
Emily: Design is a field that relies heavily on stories. Stories act as a bridge that can help us understand the context in which we are operating. They enable us to share what we have learnt. And they’re also what we use to reflect on our own experiences and for developing and evolving our own design practice. In the areas of social impact that we work in, stories are particularly potent, serving as powerful devices for bringing about the change we wish to see. By acting as the custodians of the stories we hear, designers play a crucial role in inspiring others and mobilising institutions. I’m still grappling with the weight of this responsibility and will continue to do so. It’s been fun to reflect on storytelling, and I’m looking forward to keeping up with the conversation in CPI’s storytelling community of practice!
Watch the full webinar
We covered so many fascinating questions in the webinar: from how Beth and Emily, as designers, are working with stories to how, in a world with dwindling attention spans, we could adapt storytelling into something concise without losing meaning.
Don’t miss out on a great conversation — watch the full webinar free on YouTube and dive into the resources here!
Watch the recording: Storytelling in design and policymaking
