If you’ve followed my journey thus far, or better yet actually played with the ideas presented in the previous posts on doing design based on how you learned to read, write, and tell stories, then you are ready for the next phase, how we take what we’re learning and apply it in a process that leads to a final design.
The narrative-storyboard-design process is simple. Imagine you’ve accepted the opportunity to do a design. Doesn’t matter if you are a landscape architect, an architect, or an interior designer. For that matter, given the process’s approach based on storytelling, it doesn’t matter if you don’t consider yourself a designer at all. There are three steps, well, four. Given your project, and an understanding of who the likely population is who will come to, visit, or move through your design you write a short first or second-person narrative, turn that narrative into a storyboard, and turn the storyboard into your final design. A number of benefits accompany this approach. Foremost, people come first. People in terms of their anticipated experiences set the stage for a short, one- to two-page narrative you will write. When working with homeowners the first question I ask them is, “As visitors round this corner, open this gate, or walk to the edge of your balcony and look down, what is the main message you want them to read?” Better yet, what is their walkaway message?