Great design moves. In the rest part of the book, the internal movements of the maker were assessed as an opportunity for improvisation by using the a ordances of formal structures like the three levers as a framework. The next portion looked at motion through the lens of the work’s cultural context. It explained how the world advances by expanding the adjacent possible and shifting culture, and how the motion that surrounds the work should be incorporated into the designer’s decisions through a responsiveness that sways with the work’s context. The motion continues once the work leaves the hands of its creator and moves to the audience. After publication, there is an opportunity to achieve a resonance that emotionally moves the audience, and if successful, the work continues its movement by being passed around and shared. If we’re interested in having the work resonate and propagate, narrative becomes an essential component to design, because nothing moves as quickly and spreads so far as a good story.
Stories are a given – they permeate all cultures and interpreta- tions of life. Narrative is such a fundamental way of thinking that there are even theories that say that stories are how we construct reality for ourselves. We use them to describe who we are, what we believe, where we are going, and where we came from. We create myths about our own origins, such as the Iroquois story of how the earth came to be on the back of a turtle, or the ancient Greek tale of Prometheus stealing re from Zeus and giving it to man, or the Egyptian Hapi bringing fertility to the land by ooding the Nile.
The scope of these tales is daunting, but the stories we weave need not be grand. A myth about how Helen of Troy’s face launched a thousand ships is just as much a story as a coworker’s tale about their shoelace snapping on their lunch break. A story is simply change over time, and the scale and scope of that change doesn’t matter so long as it has momentum. A story, in fact, doesn’t even need to go anywhere, as long as it feels like it is about to head somewhere good.