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Once you have what feels like a smoothly flowing written narrative, it is time to transform it into a storyboard. A few important thoughts. Storyboarding is an organized collection of individual sketches (or moments) experienced by your character(s) typically along a walk or pathway. Use 5”x7” cards. One sketch per card or page or frame…

Throughout my teaching career I believed that if you can’t express it, you can’t see it and vice versa. Getting to where you can see, and as Rae would argue, smell, touch, hear, and taste what you want to say, and clearly say what you want others to experience is helped by Betty Edwards (1999),…

Although referring to the structure of a poem, consider the following in regard to the development of a landscape design. “The formal analysis of a poem is [for the reader] largely a demonstration of probability through all the parts. Or better, in the [poem’s] beginning anything is possible; in the middle things become probable; in…

The narrowing of what can be selected from for inclusion in a narrative , and as a result a design, is what Goodman (1954) refers to as “probability” and Pouillon calls “contingency” (Chatman, 1980, 47). Both concepts help us understand the reduced availability of words or objects to be employed in writing a story or…

Identifying a design’s theme and determining the activities to be sequenced from first impression tolasting impression is a filter rarely discussed among design students and practitioners. There are designprojects students are given that focus on empathy. Students are usually given an emotion, told toempathize with it, and then turn it into either an abstract design…

While Rae uses her characters to guide her narrative’s development. Lamott focuses on writing. Many designers will identify with Lamott’s admission to the difficulties they face starting a narrative. She makes clear that your first draft can be a “shitty first draft” and that no one will see it so write whatever feels good at…

It is easy to imagine, many designers as well as students muttering, “Oh crap! I have to write a short story.” Keep in mind, writers are as mystified by what designers do as designers are of what writers do. Like most mysteries, each is a point of view waiting to be clarified. There are writers…