The Right Angle on Storytelling in Design

by Irina Nersessova | Learning Experience Designer

We make sense of our experiences by turning our memories into stories. As a designer, I’m a storyteller, and the learners whose work I seek to transform are also storytellers. These learners don’t need to be actively conscious of this, but creating meaning through narrative is key to my design approach. 

Tapping into stories and their power to enable learning is more than a series of techniques or a trend. In Learning Experience Design, story-based elements like characters and scenarios help make meaning out of information. Is there a limit to this? I would say no. Let me give you an example that illustrates my point.

If you came to me and said that it’s vital to your company that every manager know the Pythagorean Theorem—not a situation I anticipate anytime soon—I could tell you a story that allegorizes that the sum of the squares on the legs of a right triangle is equal to the square on the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle). Refer to the equation below:

The story would go something like this:

Annie and Bonnie are friends who are self-proclaimed squares and seem rooted in their room. The power of two (friends) is exponential fun. They have another friend who likes to party and is therefore known as cool Connie. Connie stands outside their room and shouts: “I can’t go to the party alone. You complete me! And 90° is just right for an outdoor get-together.”

That story is not there just for the sake of a story. By providing a way of envisioning the formula as a fun story about three friends, I am giving the theorem a more relatable meaning. That helps a learner retain information about what might otherwise be hard to understand. Making meaning out of information that is either unmeaningful or does not yet have meaning to a person is the basis of many techniques in memory competitions. However, I can’t help but think that something is missing. What’s wrong with my story?

When I wrote that story, I treated it the way I would form a memory, which is to make it make sense in my world, culturally and linguistically. I knew the slang use of the terms square and cool to mean dull and exciting respectively. The names Annie, Bonnie, and Connie were readily available in my frame of reference. I relied on the connotation of the word rooted and how similarly it’s spelled to the word room. The wordplay continues with power, exponential, complete, and using weather to reference a 90° angle could only work if I automatically think of weather on a Fahrenheit scale—I don’t think Annie and Bonnie would be willing to go outside on a 90° Celsius day, no matter how cool Connie is.

In my story, I didn’t center my learners. Although I could revise my story to limit my inevitable biases and assumptions, I’d eventually reach an exhausting limit. Fortunately, there is a better alternative. I could ask learners to come up with their own stories based on the theorem because the very exercise of creating those stories will make the theorem more memorable. Each learner can personalize their story and gain a sense of ownership over the learning process.

When I think about what makes stories engaging and memorable, I consider the aspects of stories that build connection and empathy. But in truly practicing empathy, I’m also aware of its limitations.

Good intentions in empathetic LXD can still lead to poor decisions if they are based on a superficial understanding of experiences that are not immediately relatable to the designer. Inviting learners to create their own stories is analogous to building an inclusive design team. When a range of voices representing a variety of cultural experiences participate in the learning, the result is a range of stories that are diverse and divergent. 

Listening to stories is an act of understanding worlds. For everyone, memories are pieced together based on our understanding of the world; that is, the memories have to make sense, and when they don’t, we’ll complete the memory with added details. This produces inaccuracies in our memories, but our minds sacrifice this accuracy for meaning. In creating meaning, we create narrative.

Design is concerned with what learners will remember and how it will change what they do in their work and lives, so memory is a primary consideration. Designers consider it in a multitude of ways, including using a mix of media to present information, chunking information for short-term memory, creating long-term memories from rehearsal, and creating connections between ideas.

As I think about what memories as stories and stories as memories mean to my design approach, I anticipate how the biology of the mind will indefinitely contribute to LXD. Neuroeducation already tells us about strengthening neural connections through repetition, activating different thought patterns through creative problem solving, and the emotional learning that is understood partially through the processing of memory and emotion in the amygdala. What we still don’t know about learning is at times humbling. Yet when we look inward and see ourselves as storytellers, we might realize just how much we actually do know about learning.