Dr. Mark Breitenberg Icsid President-Elect Chair of the Education Committee Dean of Undergraduate Education, Art Center College of Design, USA "Education by Design" -  A regular series of original articles on issues in design education.

4 March 2006
“My life, my card.” This is the slogan for the current American Express credit card campaign, in many ways an imitation of the MasterCard “priceless” campaign. The marketing idea in both cases is to connect the use of credit cards to our most memorable and important life experiences, perhaps even to make the use of the card one of those experiences itself.  Or consider “Martha Stewart Living,” one of the most recognizable and profitable brand identities in the world, at least until her recent legal difficulties.  Martha Stewart’s Omnimedia company has created a variety of products, including books, television shows, fashion and housewares, all based on a compelling story of domestic elegance at the country estate, at once both nostalgic for a simpler era and aspirational about the present. In 1938 the De Beers diamond company created a powerful connection between their product and everlasting love—“a diamond is forever”—a marketing coup in which diamond rings became the only appropriate gift for marriage engagements. These examples—and there are many more—remind us that designers are storytellers. And in our current transition from product-centered design to the design of human experiences, the narrative aspect of our practice is more important—and carries more responsibility—than ever before.

The power of stories comes from deep in our past and from deep in our consciousness: humans are homo fabulans, the species that tells stories. As the French critic Roland Barthes wrote, “narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society . . . it is simply there, like life itself.” The stories we tell and respond to create our collective and individual identities, confer meaning on our present lives, organize and make sense of our past in ways the past did not. They allow us to imagine the future and thus act to give it shape. And by stories I mean not just the great epics that have expressed the identity, hopes and fears of entire peoples—Homer, the Bible, The Tale of Genji, or Gilgamesh--but also the stories told today in powerful media like film and television, or the stories that sell a product by connecting the experience of everlasting love to De Beers diamonds, cultivated elegance to Mercedes Benz, or the youthful and sexy lifestyle to Miller Lite beer.

Stories make sense of our lives. Ask a couple in love how they met: they will not tell you it was a simply random event that happened by chance. They will tell a story of a chain of events guided by fate or the cosmos that led inevitably to their union—“it was meant to be, ” they will tell you. This is the power of stories to write the past so in order to make sense of the present. Stories counteract the disturbing fact that much of our lives is determined by accident, by chance. We don’t just remember the events that took place: memory is the active re-creation of those events into a coherent narrative—it’s a creative act as well as an act of recollection.

Stories are everywhere. What distinguishes one historical period from another, one culture from another, is the medium and form in which the stories are told. What forms of storytelling dominate our consciousness today? Who is in the position to tell the stories that form our individual and collective identity? Today in the west we are no longer shaped by the great narratives of Homer and the Bible, but almost everyone on the planet today can tell you the plotline of Star Wars, or imagine the lifestyle evoked by Nike sportswear.  For good or bad, popular culture and consumer culture carry the weight of writing our cultural scripts today. And this is where designers have a powerful influence on the human experience.

As any good marketer or politician knows, the truth of our collective and personal narratives is not always necessary. Following  “the facts” and “telling it the way it is” do not necessarily make the story persuasive, although the illusion of reality is one of the storyteller’s most effective tools—think of our insatiable appetite for reality TV today. The power of stories lies in their ability to exceed reality, re-write it, to give it a coherence that does not actually exist. And it comes from the way stories reveal the life we imagine living, the person we would like to be, the past as we wish it had been.

Why do stories so profoundly shape and influence our lived reality? Why is homo fabulans at the core of our being?  One of the most interesting answers comes from recent work by neuroscientists who have begun to demonstrate that narrative is ”hard-wired” in the brain. To prove this claim, their studies focus on people who have lost their ability to tell stories because of a physical injury or disease. Many suffer from “dysnarrative”—a state of narrative impairment from damage in different regions of the brain. For example, people suffering from bilateral brain damage tell “arrested narratives.” Their stories make perfect sense up to the point of their injury, but then the narrative ability stops.  They can’t finish the story. In effect, they have a past, but not a present nor a future.

Injury to the frontal lobe is often the cause of “Williams Syndrome” or “confabulation.” These people are capable of telling fantastic stories at an astonishing rate, but they have no ability to determine whether they are true or not.  They cannot distinguish reality from fiction. I often wonder if George Bush suffers from this problem. In this case the brain’s capacity to tell stories is actually increased—they bombard us with non-stop stories. The brain’s narrative ability is fine, but the person has lost any form of censorship or rational control. There’s a story about a man with Williams Syndrome who went on to great success in Hollywood—not as a writer, but as a producer. In Hollywood as in politics, true stories are often a liability.

 A third example involves injury to the frontal cortices, resulting in what are called “denarrated lives.” These patients are found to be “unable to provide an account of their experiences, words, and actions.” Some of you may know the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker from America in the mid-nineteenth century. Gage led a calm and pious life, went to church, and was about to settle down with his sweetheart. One day Gage was preparing an explosion that would allow the tracks to continue through a huge rock. He was using a tamping iron, a steel rod about an inch in diameter and six feet long, to stuff dynamite in a crevice. An accidental spark created an explosion that sent the tamping iron right through his brain—in the jaw and out the top of his head. Gage was knocked unconscious and the tamping iron landed forty feet away. Miraculously, he survived the accident. When he woke up, the pious townsfolk were afraid—there was talk of the Devil and witchcraft. But he was a completely changed man--no longer the Phineas Gage he had been before. The stories that gave meaning to his life were fractured, and he became an unruly dissolute, wandering the east coast, unable to hold down a job—a man in search of himself. Gage died in San Francisco almost 20 years later. You can go see his skull, by the way, with a big hole in it, at the Harvard Medical Library. And there is a Hollywood movie about Gage’s life starring Russell Crowe coming out this year.

So storytelling is deeply rooted in our history and hard-wired in our brains. We need stories almost as an addiction. This means that today, at a time when culture values design more than ever before, designers are in a position to tell powerful and influential stories.  From this point of view, here are some key elements of narratives that can help our storytelling as designers.

First, narratives are interactive. In literature, we know that readers are not merely passive in reading a story; they actively re-write stories in their own interest, according to their own interpretation. More and more, we see a similar exchange in corporate and product branding. Tired of being assaulted by corporate branding stories, consumers have started to re-brand products, to re-tell the story. Chrysler’s PT cruiser originally was originally marketed as a nostalgia car appealing to white suburban consumers. But it has since been re-branded with a different story by urban black Americans. The re-branding of the Tommy Hilfiger clothing line from “country club” lifestyle to hip hop culture is another example. Branding and marketing people can learn from narrative to listen to the way stories are re-told by consumers. And designers can create products that encourage users to tell their own stories in their experience of the product.

Second, narrative is experiential. Stories shape our experiences because they happen over time, in a sequence. When Phineas Gage lost his capacity for stories, the life itself became chaotic and unstructured. This idea influences many new forms of design research. Instead of studying the use and marketability of a product, new design researchers study the lifestyle, aspirations and needs of a particular demographic group. Their findings include the creation of future scenarios, stories and personas that represent the group. Only at the end of the research is a product or service determined. This is experience design, and it shows how we are changing from a product-centered to a human-centered practice.

Third, narrative is the condition of memory. We remember stories better than separate elements because narrative structure is so deeply embedded in our history and in our brains. An advertising campaign that tells a story, or a product that suggests a narrative experience, will have a much more powerful appeal, and it will be remembered longer. And of course stories about the past often re-write that past to make it more attractive than it actually was—“Martha Stewart Living” is a good example of this strategy. Marketing campaigns, products and services that can fold their stories into the established narratives of the past will have a competitive advantage.

Fourth, stories are often aspirational: they express our hopes and dreams. In our stories we are able to imagine ourselves better than the way we are, as individuals and members of groups. We can only conceive of change, or growth by telling a different story first, and then living up to it, by converting our imagination into reality. Once again, the great epic narratives that have shaped a culture’s identity are not only reflections of actual life but also imaginations of a better life. This means that the stories designers send into the marketplace can challenge consumers:  not just respond to our aspirations but give us higher aspirations by telling stories of a better future.

 
Through stories, design shapes our lifestyles, our forms of interaction, our emotional attachments, the identities we aspire to, even our past. Thoughtful, responsible designers are beginning to realize that more and more people want to increase their quality of life rather than their quantity of things.  Products and services that emphasize a richness of experience, empathy for the human condition, quality of life, feeling connected rather than alienated, will find success in today’s marketplace. And to do this designers need to tell stories that matter. Today, design in all its forms has tremendous power to tell the stories that shape our past, present and future. And with power comes responsibility. What stories should we tell? This will be the legacy of design in the 21st century.