Storytelling

As cultural and generational expectations evolve, methods of communication must also change. As methods of information consumption shift, the need to capture attention effectively increases. Similarly, the need for designers to extract and communicate meaningful information also increases. This chapter explores the role of empathy throughout the life cycle of a design career, from the learning environment through design and into firm leadership, proposing the essence of design as a fundamentally empathetic endeavour. By investigating the various goals, story-based communication can be deployed to achieve. The concept of storytelling is presented as a critical tool for designers to leverage empathy for numerous outcomes. This chapter focuses on interpersonal interaction, trust building, and vulnerability, looking into where emotion and memory live in the brain and the history of stories, grounding the concept of storytelling as an innately human activity. “Storytelling: Empathy by Design” further dives into the impact of communicating through stories by looking at various applications, including teaching and learning, programming, presentation, building firm culture, and business development.