Oh hello there, my name is Dan. I was the user experience intern on the Railyard team, and you may find it peculiar that my post comes well after my time at Railyard has ended. I held off on writing a blog post mostly because I wanted to see what experiences and learnings from my time at Railyard would carry through to my experience in another environment (I’m currently a creative technologist at AKQA, a digital agency in San Francisco). Also I’m a bit of a chronic procrastinator.

One of the big concepts in the design-o-sphere is the idea of storytelling, and to be quite honest, the degree to how storytelling is used and interpreted by designers is stretched to some pretty ridiculous lengths. I won’t lie when I say that the video where Stefan Sagmeister calls bullshit on the whole designer-as-storyteller idea brought a really large smile to my face. And I mean, he has a point: crafting the journey of a person from deciding they have a need to exploring all the possible products or what-have-you that could fulfill that need through to fulfilling the need by purchasing is a pretty boring ass story. Where’s the imagery? The metaphor? Or the imagination? I almost fell asleep writing the last half of this paragraph, that’s how boring it is.

Now I still think that storytelling has its place in design, but I think it’s put in the wrong part of the process. If storytelling is best used to captivate, then why not put that use to where it’s the most effective: drawing and captivating the people who will ultimately be responsible for allowing your ideas to come into fruition. Paint a picture, create an image in their heads that brings them into the world you envision.

When it came to the concluding presentation for the long and intensive research and recommendation project for Providence Health Care that Elsa, Jessica and I had worked on for almost the entire length of our internship, I had a valuable insight that came to light that wasn’t at all sexy, but was nonetheless extremely important for the Providence team to know. Ronna and I had gone back and forth with how exactly to get the client excited for this rather drab information for a few days before settling on what I ended up presenting: a well crafted story.

And yeah, it worked out well for my little bit of the presentation. It helped them open their eyes about where they wanted to be versus where they were and how they needed to get to that target place. But coupled with the more informative stuff that Jessica and Elsa presented on the landscape, I think we left them in a decent enough place.

Fast forward a month and a bit later. We’ve moved on from Railyard: Robbie is at Arithmetic (still in Vancouver), Elsa is back at Bridgeables in Toronto, Jessica got hired on as a project manager, and I’m sitting right now in AKQA San Francisco’s cafe writing this.

A few weeks back the interns had the opportunity to do an intensive week-long innovation project from a very large, well known sports brand (I won’t have to name them, but the particular brand the project was for is named after the most famous professional basketball player in history, if that’s any indication). My partner and I had a pretty strong concept, but we were also the only group out of the five who were unable to create a prototype due to the tech we wanted to use in its current state was highly expensive to just prototype with, way outside the bounds of our small budget.

When it came to presenting, I gave a vivid story showing how our insight had informed our experience and how that experience would play out, while my partner explained the more technical aspects of how the experience would work. I wish I could go into more detail, but you know, NDAs and all. I could tell that the judges (a mix of senior staff at AKQA and some execs from that certain sports brand) really got into the narrative we crafted, and it came out in the comments from not only the judges, but also several of the other senior staff who congratulated us on the quality of our presentation.

We ended up not winning the hackathon, but it was only by a very slim margin. And that was just with our story.

It’s kind of amazing how powerful a well-crafted story can be, when you use it in the right place. And I agree with Mr. Sagmeister that story telling should be left to the storytellers, but that doesn’t mean that we designers can’t be storytellers, we just have to know when and how we tell our stories to their greatest effect. I had the opportunity to spend the summer working with and learning from the great storytellers at Dossier (if you ever have the opportunity to listen to Don’s stories, you are in for a FANTASTIC time), and it’s made me better at expressing my thoughts, my ideas, and my visions for the future of design’s impact on everyday life.

Ok, I should get back to work.