Storytelling is a crucial skill for designers to surface ideas that resonate.
An idea that is based on truthful insight will naturally resonate and be loved, and storytelling is the key to bringing this to light. Donn shares an anecdote of designing a farming implement, and how the project team crafted a story to bring forward a missing but crucial insight that would alter the entire design.
Summary
- “You can’t really talk your way into why a product is attractive and should be accepted by the client, unless there is really a driving insight or truth behind it.”
- As a designer, you’ll then need to learn to tell stories to surface these truths in a manner that will resonate
- For example, in designing a farming implement that is meant to be minimalist and digital, an obvious insight was uncovered, that farmers’ hands have adapted to using manual tools and will not be able to comfortable use a small and sleek device
- In trying to tell the story, Donn’s project team opened their presentation with sausages, to directly bring across the message and highlight the missed insight—because it’s true, and clearly told, it resonated
Full Transcript
So we went to the client and tried to tell a story, where we really literally showed them sausages in the first (presentation) slide. When we opened the first slide with sausages they were wondering, what are we talking about!
DESIREE
In client projects, right, how do you make them love the design or love an idea? Is it similar to making things that people in general love? Or, you know, like you mentioned earlier, that clients sometimes are also concerned with the marketability or the sales aspect. So yeah, are there ways or things that you do to actually help make the idea more lovable or delightful to the clients?
DONN
I think you can’t escape, or rather, you can’t sell something that isn’t based on true appeal. And what I mean is that you can’t really talk your way into why a product is attractive and should be accepted by the client, unless there is really a driving insight or truth behind it. So I think that at the end of the truth is, in some ways, self-proving, or it withstands time.
And if the design approach is anchored around truthful insights, even if they may not be obvious, they have a certain ring of resonance to it, and you hope that your clients also prioritise this. Now, as a designer, if that’s how you approach your projects, then we need to learn to tell the stories that surfaces this truth.
This again is talking a bit meta, right? It’s like it needs almost an example to talk about. I can recall some examples on some projects. We’ve done some work around some farming implements and trying to be digital. And you can have a lot of noise and voices around saying that like, hey, let’s make this super slick, since it’s going digital. And let’s make farming feel very sexy. The devices should become like, minimalist, small, light. But when we actually study this project, and relying on our team’s familiarity with farmers, we realised that farmers’ hands are like, they tend to be really—the fingers are very thick, because they use a lot of manual tools. So that’s one of those things whereby when you look at it, and then you look at the concept, the concept is a little bit dishonest, because it’s trying to be slim and digital. And so we basically took a risk by saying that, like, this is the truth, right? We can still make it look nice, even if it’s meant to be for like thicker fingers.
So we went to the client and tried to tell a story, where we really literally showed them sausages on the first (presentation) slide. We opened the first slide with sausages, and they were wondering what are we talking about, right? But we wanted to tell them and say, this are what farmers’ fingers are like. And to burn into the memory that like, this is true, and we’ve missed this. It’s time to maybe, you know, make decisions based on this truth.
And you can see that when you tell a clear story, and you highlight something that we missed but people know is true, then it resonates. Then they can make decisions based on that.
THE STUCK IN DESIGN TEAM
Desiree Lim, Kevin Yeo, Matthew Wong