Flinging stories into the future
Kevin and I were thinking about how stories work. In many cases, the value of stories is in their ability to bring the past into the present.
Family stories and corporate stories both keep the past alive, creating a culture out of shared events and how they are shaped and interpreted in a story. Think of “the story of how our company was founded” as a guiding principle in the values and mission of a company.
Other stories preserve information as a narration about an event. The stories swapped by the Xerox copier repairmen, made famous in The Social Life of Information, are stories that serve as a knowledge management repository.
But the real value of stories in user experience design is that they can move us into the future.
Steve Denning’s springboard stories are like that. Their goal is to get a running start on a situation, and then let the audience take the final leap, imagining where that beginning might lead.
We started thinking about stories as a kind of trebuchet. You wind it up by loading it with information about the present. But it’s power comes when all that information is released to fly out into the future.
This can be a great way to introduce subtle shifts in context, and then describe a future that extends that trajectory. Here’s an example that explicitly builds on time:
- 20 years ago: He liked going to his favorite music store and browsing through the bins of classic vinyl for unusual records.
- 15 years ago: She's walking down the street talking on the phone...
- 10 years ago: He reads articles from 10 news papers from around the world a day.
- 5 years ago: After 30 years of collecting music, she could carry her entire music library in her purse, search through it quickly and play any selection. [And all she's missing are liner notes.]
- Today: He hears a song playing in a café, holds up his phone, learns the title, and grabs it to add to his collection.
And here’s where your story of the future begins… In one way, it might be a wild fantasy for an innovation. But, the trebuchet reminds us of all the magical innovations that we’ve already seen, and shows us that maybe this new idea isn’t such a big leap after all.
We’re curious. What strategies have you used to introduce a radical idea, one that both breaks with the past and is an extension of it (if you look at it the right way)?
Comments
I'm intrigued with your ideas. I'm wondering how this is different, if it is different, from Use Cases, personas, or scenarios.
A big red flag waved wildly when I read your paragraph:
"20 years ago: He liked going to his favorite coffee shop, finding a spot in the corner, and opening his computer to search the city for people selling good used furniture or classic vinyl."
There were no computers in coffee shops 20 years ago. There was no wireless 20 years ago. Computers were large unwieldy things and monitors were heavy 20 years ago. The smallest computer then was a old Mac Plus, which would have been 3 years old then. But it only had 1MB RAM. Upgradable to 2MB.
Posted by: j wallace | February 4, 2009 7:05 PM
J: You are right. We were working on the example without thinking about the real world. A great cautionary tale about trying to remove identifying information from a work project without checking against common sense. We've fixed that.
But your bigger question is how this is different than use cases, scenarios, or personas. It's not really. They are all types of stories.
In this case, Kevin was looking for a way to show that an idea might not be as radical as a product team thought. These could have been stories or scenarios about a persona. What he was focused on was seeing how new technologies and new "typical" behaviors go together.
This is, by the way, similar to a shamanistic technique in which the stories start from a detailed description of the immediate surroundings and the activities leading up to a ceremony, and then launch from that point into the spirit world.
In both cases, the idea is that the grounding in past events can help the audience make the leap into an imagined future.
Posted by: Whitney Quesenbery | February 25, 2009 5:37 PM
I assisted to some conferences for developers in Cupertino, Apple, from 1981 to 1992, and Jobs Steve and those working with him were great in telling the tale of what great things the future will bring, not only for one product but the personal computer business. We did believe his visions, and that had a great impact.
I also listened twice to Microsoft's Bill Gates, he could also spin a tale and make people believe, also he was not as good in doing it as was Steve Job's. Storytelling ability can help a lot, even if of course, it is not all.
They both, introduced "radical ideas" and long time before it became feasible, made us dream about using a computer under a tree, for example.
Posted by: julie kertesz | February 27, 2010 2:16 AM