Title: Narratives in design toolkit

Authors: Silvia Grimaldi

Addresses: Design School, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, SE1 6SB, London, UK

Abstract: Given that all design is narrative in some way, this paper describes a toolkit to help designers and design students to identify, analyse, articulate and manipulate the narrative elements that are present within design work. It is significant for designers to be able to talk about the narrative within design artefacts, looking at the narrative inherent in the design process or in the user experience of that artefact can help to articulate what a design is about and plan for how it can be interpreted. Narrative is not an easy concept to define; studied by different fields, it is defined differently by each narratology school. This toolkit provides a language for designers to articulate how narratives work within design. The toolkit is tested as both an analytical and generative tool with groups of design students. This paper presents examples of the resulting work and the results of the toolkit testing.

Keywords: narratives in design; narrative; story; storytelling; product experience; product design; service design; experience design; design methodology.

DOI: 10.1504/JDR.2020.115939

Journal of Design Research, 2020 Vol.18 No.3/4, pp.113 - 136

Received: 21 Feb 2019
Accepted: 23 Nov 2019
Published online: 05 Jul 2021 *

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