Thesis: Spring Semester

This semester is focused on designing based on the fall semester's research. After speaking with my professor yesterday, I realized I needed a quick visualization of what exactly my focus is. Enter the above graphic. Basically, I started the semester looking at "storytelling" but quickly narrowed down to storytelling  as social interaction. I then realized that there were some broader topics I needed to look at: culture, digital technology, and the idea of archiving. As much as I have a lot of broad topics, I want my final design to focus on the overlap of these terms.

Down to the wire

My desktop last night. For some reason whenever I write a paper I need to have at least 4-5 files for it: notes, outline, keywords, freewrite (where I just ramble out of order), and the final draft. I move between the files as well as my notebook in order to make sense of everything. I like using a notebook because I find that I need to physically write out notes from what I've been reading in order to retain the information better.

As much as I've taken a lot of writing courses over the past five years, I'm finding this to be the most difficult paper I've ever written. It has little to do with the length and more to with getting the content in order. I've never been good at putting things in order. I tend to jump around until everything falls into place. This paper has already had three outlines, each changing slightly.

The other difficulty with my thesis is that this isn't going to end up as an "academic" paper, it's going to be a design book. I'm writing very academically right now, but I know the final draft is going to end up focusing more on images and short bursts of information.  I need to process academically first before I can condense.

Something I forgot along the way

I'm currently writing a new outline of the beast that will become my thesis booklet. Along the way, I've written a few questions I hope to answer, the most important being:

Why do we tell stories?

In the course of reading "important" academic texts, I came to the high-minded answer that stories are told in order to "understand the human condition," "make sense of the world," "create a sense of empathy towards others" and so on. I only now realized that I missed a very important point:

Stories are told for the pleasure they bring to both storyteller and audience.

There is just something so fun about either telling or hearing a good story (I must admit, I am usually on the hearing end of a story).  This thesis may be an in-depth analysis of story and storytelling methods, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be dry and dull and overly "important."


So I'll end with a quote from the first essay of the book pictured above, titled "Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story," in which Michael Chabon somehow makes the idea of entertainment a deep one:

"The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit [entertainment] is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection."

What's a Story? In Visuals/Words

 So, I've spent a lot of time figuring out my own personal definition of story and storytelling. While working on a presentation for this week I came up with some simple visuals to show what I mean. Unfortunately, I had to scrap this presentation and simplify, so the visuals weren't used, but I figured they could live on here.

This is a chart that most people have seen in grade school about plot. I think it's actually a good start, but the idea of rising and falling action can leave out a lot of stories. I think a lot of stories actually look like:

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The Why

I've added a few more books to the pile in the past few weeks. Though now I am trying to organize what I have and narrow down exactly what information I need to give more life to this thesis.

Last week I spoke at length with one of my professors about my thesis.  During the course of the conversation she asked me "Why did you decide to do this thesis?" It took me aback, I've been so focused on just creating a thesis that I sort of forgot why I find storytelling so interesting in the first place. As much as stories have been part of my entire life, the thing that set off this thesis was:

I read Coupland's novel in May and wrote a brief review on my Tumblr (here).  Like I say in my review, what I found so fascinating were the scenes in which characters had to make up stories. Coupland did a good job contrasting the "true" stories being told as compared to their efforts to create a story. There is also a communal aspect to the tellings. The characters' stories begin to mix together, become one collective tale.

This, I guess is my "why." I want to know where communal storytelling is going. Is Twitter going to really becoming our best method of telling stories as a community (as in- retweets and thousands of tweets about one news story)? Are Youtube comments a sort of storytelling in and of themselves? 

Also, why do we still make up stories? Is there still a purpose to them? I like to think so, though it might not be a quantifiable. 

So what is it I'm doing?

Above are the fruits of my first library trip for thesis. I have slowly been eliminating some as useless and plowing through others for information. The best books lead me to more sources, while others lead to dead ends.

So what am I studying for thesis? There's a theme in the titles of the books: they all mention "story" in one guise or another (narrative, fiction, literature). I have decided to tackle the idea of storytelling from a design standpoint, as in:

How were stories told?
How are stories told?
How will stories be told?

No, this is not going to be a new E-reader design (though I will cover that phenomenon in some depth at some point). I've set myself the task of looking at story through as many lenses as possible: philosophical, linguistic, psychological, anthropological, sociological, among others. I've spent the past few weeks defining exactly what I mean by "story."

This blog is hopefully going to encompass not only the "story" of my thesis but also the story of my fifth and final year as an industrial design student.

And that, in a nutshell, is what it is I'm doing.

Next time: what the heck do you mean by "story"?