Reflection on “Storytelling with Lee-Sean Huang”
Like many of the people Lee-Sean Huang has encountered, I have always associated storytelling with entertainment (movies, novels, etc.) as well as final product pitches. This podcast revealed to me that the research phase actually starts out with storytelling. When a designer is talking to the people who they are designing for or with, they’re collecting stories about them. Through the stories, designers can learn the peoples’ history, the reasoning behind their actions, and how they understand the world around them. These stories are then synthesized into insights that allow designers to design. Furthermore, stories help designers understand systems. Instead of creating a brochure or an app, telling a story from the perspective of a user or client allows the designers to find different touch-points. Stories can then be used to determine the possibility of a product’s success since the designer is telling a story from point A, which is the current state of the world today, to point B, which is a desired future world in which the design exists. In addition, stories can be immensely useful at the team level. Before starting a project, how do the team members talk about their hopes and fears? What does success look like for them? Putting all of this in the form of a story instead of bullet points helps get the point across clearly and creates a greater emotional connection between the team members.
Another point that stood out to me from the podcast is that although we are taught the design process and storytelling structures, there aren’t any strict rules about either of these processes. We learn specific ways of doing both of these, but all of them are simply guides. If a person just follows the steps that other people tell them to follow, then the end product will be “robotic” — it won’t be as innovative or unique. It is important for designers and storytellers use their own creativity to learn and connect with users.
