Towards a Storytelling Pedagogy for Design

Storytelling is widely acknowledged as fundamental to design practice, playing a role in how designers communicate ideas, create user experiences, and engage with broader industry narratives. In spite of this, research that explores storytelling pedagogy is infrequent and fragmented and focuses on specific sub-disciplinary contexts, its broader implications for design education remain relatively underexplored. This gap poses the question: how can we integrate storytelling into design pedagogy to better prepare students for industry?
Design research has consistently suggested that designers need to be more transparent about the underpinning theory and models that support the application of storytelling. Two key rationales for this need have emerged: firstly, the shift in industry from a focus on product, to product experience, and secondly, the growing approach in industry that employs storytelling as strategy. These characteristics of industry call for a deeper exploration of storytelling in design practice, particularly in contexts where designers must mediate complex systems involving diverse stakeholders.
The author of this paper seeks to establish guiding principles for a storytelling design pedagogy, through a cross-case comparison of data from collaborative projects between their institution’s final year product design students and John Lewis and Partners. In total, forty-six projects were completed by students during this collaboration over five years, with each culminating in the verbal delivery of a story supported by visual presentation materials during design pitches. Of particular interest is the comparison between the projects selected vs. those unselected for publication.