Storytelling

How to tell an emotionally engaging story

One of the unit’s lessons was used by Sara and Leslie to introduce the topic of storytelling. I took away some valuable ideas that I would like to keep in mind for presenting a solution or idea in an emotionally engaging way.

According to Sara a story is valuable for every target group and every design project as the story makes the design relatable for the human who is the consumer or target group. The story creates an emotional involvement and thereby experience. Some techniques that make a good story include having an opening ‘hook’ to catch the attention, introducing a main character of the story, maybe even by name, as well as a location and time of the story and have a captivating plot that indicates the problem or idea of the design concept. All the details of the story should cater to the communication of the strategic idea.

A positive example of powerful story telling are Alexander McQueen’s fashion shows. He demonstrates how a strong story telling can catching people’s attention and getting them emotionally involved.

Alexander McQueen's AW 2009/10 collection during Paris Fashion Week (Fury, 2015)

The fashion designer translates his vision into a coherent picture integrated in the clothes he develops and the story he tells on stage. In class we identified various methods he applies for that:

• Creating tension by showing polarities

• Pride for heritage by building on established traditions to trigger people’s emotions, showing them something they know and making them feel connected to a contemporary evolution

• Multisensorial story telling by including different media to transmit the same story

• Personal passion by completely committing to the vision thereby making it authentic

• Perfection of execution by paying attention to every detail making it a perfect wholistic experience

For our team project, we discussed a lot, if we wanted to tell the story of harm of plastic to the ocean and sea creatures by displaying suffering animals, thereby creating tension. We finally decided to focus on the positive impact the consumers could have in our communication. This led to the design of our product – the phone case with pocket and the bag – incorporating stylised and peaceful animal images.

Phone case and bag design suggestions (Ramons-Prado, 2019)

We played with the heritage factor in the marketing campaign, by illustrating the time a piece of plastic was in the ocean relating it to their own age. We plan to show old plastic items found in the sea produced in a specific year and invite people born in that year to take a selfie. Like this the long time plastic stays in the ocean gets more tangible. The marketing campaign is also our suggestion to transmit our story through various media.

In the project process, we put emphasis on understanding our personal passion for the topic and referring back to it regularly. For this we even created an engaging photo collage, displaying our energy for the topic.

Our team and motivation (Ramos-Prado, 2019)

The perfection of execution would be the next step of the development process.

Altough in retrospective we follow a clear storytelling throughout the project, for the rollout of our product idea, the campaign and all additional marketing activities, a more elaborated guideline for a consistent communication would have to be developed.

Reference List:

Fury, F. (2015) ‘Alexander McQueen: The catwalk was a stage for the designer's astonishing and troubling vision’, Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/features/the-catwalk-was-a-theatrical-stage-for-alexander-mcqueens-astonishing-and-troubling-vision-10071781.html (Accessed: 07.03.2019).

Ramons-Prado, L. (2019) Phone case and bag design suggestions. Graphic design for our group project.

Ramos-Prado, L. (2019) Our team and motivation. Graphic design for our group project.