Our exploration of Landscape as Storytelling brings us to a number of conclusions. First and foremost is that “People Come First.” Well, Simonds would likely say “people’s experiences come first.” Following that thinking here, once you’ve developed a written narrative, turned it into a storyboard reflecting the narrative’s content, flow, and continuity, you can then develop the final design. This is where plan views, elevations, site inventory and analysis, site engineering, construction techniques, plant selection all come into play. As I have come to believe, a people-come-first approach to design is the crux of good, if not great design. That is the art of design; the engineering, soil sciences, grading and drainage calculations, and such are the science of design.
Another conclusion provided by The Analogy and, more specifically, the narrative-storyboard-design approach, is the pressure, as noted back in post #33, many of us have felt when delivering design presentations. Writing narratives of a design’s potential participants’ experiences, oddly enough, takes the decision-making responsibilities off our shoulders as “the” designer. Often people readily identify with the narrative’s expressed emotion and experiences as related to moments along a design’s spatial sequence. Questions dealing with the participant’s experiences are more discussions moving to a mutual level of understanding as to why clients are seeing the specific features and spaces that make up a design.