Week 6 - Design as Narrative

How can you drive your own domain of practice to use stories to better communicate your intentions?

• coming from an illustration background, I am always in a constant need of delivering stories. Looking back at my past projects, I’ve always tried to include stories from people as well as how I feel about it. I’ve made a zine with a story illustrating the struggle of a PTSD victim. I used symbolisms and metaphorical narrative to represent the ghosts of people who suffer PTSD. I’ve made a book telling the violent history of Chinese Indonesians and how it impacted them culturally and psychologically. I took my time to also include my personal view towards the whole thing, which made the book feel more authentic. I think that having your own perspective and feelings towards certain things really do matter as a designer. Anybody can take on different subject matters that have dark, devastating, or unique backgrounds. But it is also the way we pack and deliver it. That is what separates one designer from another. I think that creating expressive works is what define us as a designer or an artist. The intentions will show itself.

How can you redirect design as a narrative to better tell forecasted future scenarios?

• Reflecting on what Yuval Noah Harari said, we are beings that communicate through stories. That is what define us as humans. We do not use numbers and graphs, but we sense patterns and create a narrative by learning from our history. Now I am currently pursuing BADP and It actually helps me craft myself to become a better designer and illustrator. I learn to be more understanding and empathic to the world around me. Exploring new aspects of design such as service design is such a wonderful chance for me to further equip me in communicating my voice in my works. Gathering data from people, research, looking onto what has been done, brainstorm, and to create a service design itself is a way of creating a narrative and re imagining future scenarios. Designers look forward and imagine future possibilities. Behind a good design is a good story. We need to understand people first, uncover patterns, and create limitless design. I wish to help people and make them heard. Like I said, the intentions reveal itself.

"It’s our job to turn extraordinary events

into ordinary everyday stories"

It is mindblowing for me to think that the very thing we use everyday has been thought of and processed in a million times before they were even released. Our phones, radio, cars, public transports. It is a designers job to constantly learn from history, imagine scenarios, creating stories, to give the best possible products to help us.

"The magic we can create is

when someone can pull out a phone

and perform magic 50x a day

And think nothing of it"

I used to think a good design is that which makes us think and wonder, but now I realized they are those who make us not think at all, because of how well thought of and designed they are, that we do not even realize that people designed this.

Class Activity - Signal Triangulations

From our class activity, we had to deconstruct an article and identify the signals. I learned to actually see things through and what they actually meant. And from there I learned to identify the signals, what can this bring for the future, what changes would be made?

And upon creating a future scenario, we designed a story where most of the blue-collar jobs are getting taken over by robotics, and now "human-centered" works are more valued in big brands. Gen Z and millenials are now expected to have different skill sets with academics not being too considered, and creative works are more sought.

We also designed how this will affect the way they showcase themselves in social medias like LinkedIn, where they would now have long titles to showcase what skillsets they have and what experience they gained.