A final note, regarding things to be aware of when making a combined narrative-storyboard presentation as a means of expressing your design. Such presentations are extremely powerful. Unlike many design presentations comprised of design jargon and the language of geometry, your written narrative is a presentation of design participants’ experiences. As such, your client readily identifies with participants in a narrative supplemented by a sequential design through which they move at eye level. With a narrative, a story, accompanied with eye-level sketches as opposed to an oral presentation made with plan view drawings, the number of assumptions between you and your client are minimized while empathy is heightened.
In an unexpected experience, the power of a written narrative accompanied with eye-level storyboard sketches became blatantly evident when a sculptor friend, Ken Spiering, and I made a presentation to the Providence Sisters, hospital administration, and staff of a proposed healing garden. We wanted to use this presentation to get client feedback during the design’s development and not at its conclusion. About 5 minutes into the presentation I realized people had started crying. At first I didn’t understand what was happening. After a few very anxious moments I began to realize the extent to which people around the table were identifying with the experiences and emotions of our narrative’s character. The garden presentation was made with eye-level sketches and common everyday “Hi glad to meet you” language of the design’s proposed participants. Again, and I can’t say this enough, this doesn’t happen when presentations are made with plan view drawings accompanied with design jargon. That kind of presentation calls for too many assumptions on the part of both the designer-presenters and the clients: enclosure heights; spatial defining materials; foreground, middle ground, framed views, and more. Even when two designers discuss a design, especially while referring to plan view drawing, there are a myriad of assumptions at play. With assumptions come a limited mutually agreed upon understanding of what a design provides and how it will be experienced. Your design participants’ story as expressed through their five senses lends credence to Simonds’ epiphany that we design not things but experiences. The narrative-storyboard approach brings people to the forefront of your design process.