Websites as Fabrics of Stories
In the mid-nineties, I had the privilege of working with a few really bright minds from the Institute for Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University. That outfit was the started by artificial intelligence doyen of the 70s, Roger Schank. The premise underlying much of the research at ILS was that people learned through stories.
After all, most cultures have their own version of the creation story. Ancient Greek history is transmitted across time and space through Homer’s Iliad and Oddessy. And the USA has Hollywood.
But for the longest time, I was a tech fanboy and am currently a recovering one. And although I have degrees in the social sciences and arts, technology and the storytelling remained in separate compartments. SQL and Python were stored in one container while F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kazuo Ishiguro lived in another.
I’ve been leading web development projects since the mid-90s. And my approach to all things web had been to build structures that facilitated the storage and retrieval of information. A website was about making it easy for content creators to deposit information, and then making it even easier for the end user or consumer to access the information or services they seek.
Towards the middle of 2015, I became interested in content strategy for professional reasons and started to look at the web through a different set of lenses. I began to cotton on to what marketers had been doing almost a century, and to what Roger Schank and his team were saying and doing (they commercialized their research). Storytelling is the key to engaging with people. What if I started looking at any web project as creating a fabric by weaving individual stories into a more coherent whole?
In early December 2015, Lydia and I got a call from a good friend from Singapore — Nicholas Leong. He said that he was going to visit Melbourne (the one in Australia, not Florida) in January 2016 and asked if he could bunk over at our place. Naturally, we said yes.
Fast forward to January 25, 2016. I picked up Nick from Sandringham (a suburb of Melbourne) in the afternoon. He had gone straight from the airport to a meeting with the manager of his pro-cycling team, Kenyan Riders Downunder (KRD). His was a unique cycling team. It was the only UCI Continental (Division 3) team in Africa. KRD comprised 6 Kenyan, 4 Australian and 3 New Zealander cyclists. It’s the pro incarnation of Nick’s vision to race a Kenyan team at the Tour de France. In a former life, Nick was a successful commercial photographer with clients like the Ritz Carlton and Banyan Tree Resorts.
Over the next day or so, Nick asked for my help with digital and content. And quite obviously, the first thing KRD needed was a website. KRD had a small budget for everything. And they had two objectives for 2016 — race a lot and find one or more naming sponsors. But what they have in abundance are really compelling human interest stories. And beautiful photos — that’s the least one could expect from a founder and CEO who was a commercial photographer.
So what’s one to do? The budget wouldn’t cover a bespoke website with a custom UX. So I decided to view this project from a perspective that I wasn’t accustomed to. I decide to view this project as one of creating a fabric made of stories — of the team’s roots, their present day experiences, and their hopes for the future.
So for the next 5 weeks or so, we worked on elements of those multiple narratives, worked out a simple information architecture, created the website in Squarespace, developed the content in various media, and started weaving that fabric of stories. The creative process was very different from what I was used to. Nick and I would sit at the same table and we’d work on various elements of content while grappling with the idiosyncrasies of various tools like Apple Keynote and Adobe Premiere. But that’s material for another blog post.
The stories of Kenyan Riders Downunder are told at http://kenyanridersdownunder.com
Are those stories compelling? If you were looking at including a sports team in your marketing portfolio, would you want to own the stories of Kenyan Riders Downunder?
I’d love to hear your views. Please comment on this post or send feedback via Twitter to @kelvinparam with the #LifeMeetsData hashtag.
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