As an Irish person, storytelling isn't just a means of entertaining others or creating an understanding of an experience to which we can relate — it's part of our culture.
As a people, we have a rich oral tradition reaching far back into the distant past, from fables of the Fianna and Oisín in Tír na nÓg, seanchaí, right up to the more modern literary greats such as Yeats, Wilde and world renowned filmmakers such as Lenny Abrahamson.
It's a means of understanding complex issues, experiences and a way of emphasising what we value as a culture. It helps us to empathise with the situations of others and the problems they face — in short, it's a means of creating an emotional impact with the audience when speaking on an issue and makes points more memorable by putting it into the context of an experience.
A good story is fully immersive — it's not so simple as to describe a chain of events; it's appealing to all the senses to create vivid imagery to which the listener can relate.
A great story has the ability to resonate with listeners on a much deeper level. It can alter our perspective on a certain topic and even go beyond this to making an emotional impact with an audience which can mobilise people to take action and influence change.
Think of all the leaders of mass social change and reform over the last few decades — the one thing almost all of them have in common is an ability to describe an experience or idea that resonates deeply with their audience: Martin Luther King and Jim Larkin to mention but two.
If design is essentially the communication of concepts through various media, then I suppose that this implies we are all storytellers to a degree. We use the tools available to us to transform a mental image, an idea, into something tangible — something real, something that has a broader impact than a simple thought. We can use our descriptive skills to help people understand the problems we are attempting to solve, to understand our users and to convince others of the merit of our ideas.
Of course, there are some who would disagree — most notably, Stefan Sagmeister: 'People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers. It's all the people who are not storytellers who kind of, for strange reasons, because it's in the air, suddenly want to be storytellers. There is this fallacy out there. I don't think I fell for it, but somehow maybe unconsciously I did.'
So, alright, maybe we as designers might not generally be as skilled at spinning yarns as J K Rowling, maybe we don't always string sentences together in the most poetic way — but a story is more than a collection of words. We can make our ideas jump from a page into the material world, we can break down and understand problems so that we can go about solving them, and we have the ability to think and speak in analogies to draw different fields and people together to achieve a common goal. You may not need the gift of the gab to be a great designer, but having the ability to use it effectively sure helps.
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