Sometimes polite people ask you what you’re working on or what’s keeping you busy.
Thinking back to your most recent creative project, you might launch into a detailed description of every step you took. And while your own creative brain is a fascinating place for you to hang out, other people may need a map if you want them to follow.
A creative process is usually opaque to people who are outside of it. But you don’t have to let this lead to confusion. Certain elements of your journey are important for others to know because they might help someone realize the very reason that your work is useful or innovative. You can give others the generous gift of insight into your creative process if you take the time to craft clarity out of this complex, nonlinear way of working.
How does it work?
This activity is a way to put together a good story about a creative project—or any situation in which you learned something valuable—even if the underlying experience has a lot of twists and turns. Use it not just to inform others, but also to distill and share your experience in a succinct, compelling manner.
The activity
First, establish the entire possible story landscape by thinking back to when you started doing the work and when you stopped. Make a quick list of all the things that occurred, in the sequence in which they happened.
Grab a piece of paper and draw a horizontal line across it. This line represents the average of your experience. Using this average as your anchor, graph the process that unfolded from left to right, showing all the highs and lows you went through.
Now isolate the most dramatic moment. You find this moment by seeing where the shape of your graph goes from the highest high to the lowest low, and back up to high again. Focus in by drawing a box around just this portion of your graph. In doing so you’re creating a tighter frame—literally and figuratively—for your story. Ignore everything else on the page, and for a moment, explore how to use that segment as the story of your creative journey by articulating what’s now in that small box.
Capture four elements by writing them down or voicing them out loud:
- Where were you, when was this, and what you were trying to do?
- What went wrong?
- How did you finally fix it? What did you do?
- What is the takeaway?
Elaborate on these elements—and you’ve got a story to work with.
When you share a story that you have built using this assignment, your listener will resonate with it because the underlying structure of a very familiar tale is embedded. The context sets the scene, then an obstacle or problem creates tension. The way you overcome the issue offers relief from the tension in the form of a resolution, which leads to a lesson or idea that helps your audience make sense of what has happened. Meaning is transferred between humans, and culture moves forward.
Of course, there’s never just one story for your design work, or any other experience you’ve had. There are many ways to look at it. If you shift your focused frame to
a different part of your map, what story would result? How would people think differently about you and your work?
This assignment is so useful because before you put words to your story and spend time writing or talking it out, you can walk through the entire journey quickly. It is a low-resolution, story-prototyping tool. If you share your story even at this basic level with the person or people you’re trying to communicate with, you’ll find out what’s relevant and what’s resonating very quickly.
Credits
Originally published in Creative Acts for Curious People by Sarah Stein Greenberg
The "What Went Down" activity was created by Seamus Yu Harte and Grace Hawthorne with inspiration from Kenn Adams
LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL