Kevin Brooks
I work in the User Experience Group, part of the Experience Design and Prototyping Lab of Motorola Labs. I am engaged in three types of endeavors, all of which are informed by story or storytelling:
- Telling Story as a widely applied business tool. We all tell stories all the time, to gain mind-share, gain "traction" for an idea or innovation, persuade, defend, and to understand new things and understand old things anew. Defined in this way, much of business and most of corporate research involves storytelling. Some of it is entirely storytelling. See my work-in-progress page on storytelling in business.
- Innovating Storytelling is a process of innovation. When someone weaves a story, they bring together elements of culture, language, and structure. Weave a story about technology and what gets added are the technology situated in a culture, the technology as a tool for communication, the structured methods of interaction with the technology and mental models of how to think about and understand the technology. In addition, we have a culturally specific innate metric for story - we know when it's good, when it's bad, when it's weak, strong, finished and not finished. Story is something that is natural for us to construct and to measure. As a tool to guide innovation, I believe that story construction done either individually or collaboratively is an essential element of technical innovation.
- Interacting The storytelling process, the physical act of conveying a story to others, offers certain valuable models and elements for thinking about human interface. Story has been one of the central reasons for people to communicate with people since people could communicate. Certainly something as old and as primal as storytelling can offer a mode of communication as anemic as buttons and a tiny screen some sort of wisdom. It does.