Storytelling as a Design Method in Redesigning the Foster Care & Adoption Experience
Reinforcing a human-centered approach to qualitative and quantitative research.
From building context to identifying user insight, and defining the problem, the design process has many layers. It is in this pool of information where big ideas are born. All of the hours of qualitative and quantitative research, the long brainstorms, and pattern finding leads to solutions. However, critical details can all fall through the cracks unless a solid story is established.
Together, the first-year MDES cohort harnessed the power of storytelling to bring our ideas to life. As we have established, the Foster Care and Adoption experience are extremely complex. We have gathered a tremendous amount of insight, identified our problem, and have come up with our big ideas.
So now, first things first, what is storytelling?
Storytelling: the activity of telling or writing stories.
Storytelling is nothing new, it has been a way to communicate since the beginning of humankind. Today, storytelling is an adaptable tool that is used in design research. By telling stories, designers are able to visualize complexity, build empathy, and establish a common language that engages viewers. It’s what grounds research by building context. It’s what helps focus storytellers and listeners towards the most important star of a story, humans.
Gathering Foster Care & Adoption Story Content
When building a story for a topic like Foster Care and Adoption, it’s important to start with insight that gave our cohort goosebumps. The insights that sent us on an emotional rollercoaster during interviews and research. These are the nuggets of information that give life to the story. They are the “aha” moments that continue to shed light on the real problems at hand and validate the solutions that are being presented.
Our cohort knows who we are and who we are not. We are designers, we are not parents, children or social workers. Staying true to these insights is extremely important, so we utilized many quotes from our interviews in our presentation. We made sure that the quotes were anonymous in order to be mindful of privacy. We noticed the rich point of view within these interviews and there’s no one better for our audience to hear these actual voices. Voices that are not manipulated, voices that are simply true, even if they are saying things that the audience doesn’t necessarily want to hear. By showcasing these voices, we are letting the truth come to the surface of our story.
Honoring Memorable Characters
Diving in one step deeper, it’s important to honor memorable characters in this story. For us, we gathered quotes, facts, and data around the children. Although most of our content was developed from interviews with social workers, foster parents, and pre-adoptive parents, we made sure to keep the children first. They are why we are so passionate about this project. Together with the many other actors in the system, the children are why we get up in the morning.
Building an Engaging Narrative
In order to build an engaging narrative, we gathered the content that spoke to us the most and framed it around the children. We knew we wanted to take a Hero’s Journey approach to this plot, so we placed the child at the beginning of the story and at the end. Then we started to build the story by speaking about our process, our findings, our overarching How Might We statement, and lastly our solutions. Among all of these chapters of the story, we made sure we backed everything up with insights and tied it back to the story of the child. Once we felt like our process was understood, we introduced our solutions. This type of setup gave way for a nice runway into viable and desirable solutions, with true meaning behind them.
Creating Compelling and Easy to Understand Visuals
Behind every great story, there are incredible visuals. Think Star Wars, Avatar, and the Titanic. Not only do these storylines give you emotional feels, but they were also backed up by compelling visuals. This provides a way for an audience to gain further understanding and connect with the story. For our Foster Care and Adoption story, we harnessed photographs of children, parents, and social workers. We wanted to make sure our audience knew that all of our research centered around real people. Besides photographs, we also developed a graphic element style to showcase complex ideas in very simple ways. With the power of striking photographs and strong visuals, we made a presentation that was not only emotional but also informative.
Designing a Satisfying Ending
The ending of every story is important. For us, it was not only important to end with the children, but also showcase the final takeaways from our presentation. The MDES cohort decided to end our story with our mission and with the reinforcement that as designers, we believe in iteration. With the design process, nothing is ever done. At the end of our design story, we made sure our audience knew that these proposed solutions are only the beginning. It takes far more conversations, testing, and exploring, to see solutions through. Therefore we opened up the conversation to talk about these ideas and to answer any questions that our audience may have had. By taking this multi-dimensional approach to ending our story, we are able to engage with the audience in a deeper way. It’s through conversation and this human-centered approach to storytelling, that we can expand upon our ideas, therefore continuing our journey towards problem-solving.
Next Steps…
MDES first-year, Divya Mangadu will be publishing an article that elaborates on our final pitch. Stay tuned for more details on how we pitched our final concepts back to the client.
