A Story to Experience

Statement 1: Story is the most powerful tool in a designers toolkit

Statement 2: And an experience is, simply, a story we tell ourselves

I do believe that at the end of the day, story is the most powerful tool in a designers toolkit. Without story it can become impossible relay what you’ve designed or how far you’ve pushed a concept for the better. With no story, your outcomes seem less a product of a single initiative and more an assumption you’ve made based only on intuition. A story has the ability to motivate those who are skeptical or unmoved by your word.

While I do think that experience is related to story and can encompass story, it has another dimension. A story is something that is presented. Its elements such as theme, characters, point-of-view, plot, conflict, and resolution can be conceptualized and added to without contradiction through empathy and imagination. People have license to add to the world and extents of stories without it detracting from its utility as a deliverer of information, giving them the illusion a complete story that encompasses both the author and reader’s vision.

An experience is asking to be inhabited, tested, and described. In many ways it is more of an assertion to a story’s supposition because much of the time the experience is asked to exist in more modes than one. In the same way the extents of an experience can be much more harsh as they are often complex expressions of an idea or formulation with fewer dimensions and restraints. For example, a story may talk about something physical or an engagement between two characters and simply describe the details or outcomes. An experience must create the materiality of the physical piece or the mental model of an actor within the engagement so that the user might believe that they are experiencing these things long enough to believe it and take away an impression in line with the experience creator’s intention.