When you hear the word story,
what do you see? A blank canvas with a set of pencils? Or do you have strings
of texts running through your mind? Or colours of many sounds? Or do you get a
series of images, pictures you’ve seen and pictures you’ve taken with your own
camera? Perhaps there isn’t an image which would capture the dynamic flow and
immense variability of stories we create, remember, live and share…perhaps we
cannot visualise stories.
However, when deciding about the user interface of the Our Story app, we
needed to come up with a working metaphor of what a story ‘looks like’. Or to be more precise-what a story created by
young children on a smartphone or tablet might look like. Currently, the Our Story app user interface
consists of a gallery of pictures on the top of the screen and a filmstrip
where users can drag individual pictures in a sequence. So I guess one way of visualising stories is
to see them as a linear sequence of a start, middle and an end, with individual
images enriched with sounds and texts.
But what about stories which don’t have a specific structure, which
evolve in the moment of story-sharing and like a spiral, are part of a never-ending
evolving cycle? Perhaps for such stories there should be a spiral rather than a
filmstrip. A helix in which users can add and edit their images, sounds and texts and let
them all mix and organically grow together.
But then there are also children’s stories which are not to be shared,
which live like a small Russian doll inside a larger doll, and which the story-tellers prefer to hide from the
public eye. Perhaps for those kinds of stories, there should be an app with which you
can only very carefully peel off the story layers, and selectively share their deeper
meanings.
So, perhaps there are three metaphors for visualising stories.
If you were to design an app on story-making, what would the
user-interface look like? I’ll leave you to ponder it with a quote by Green, 1997, p.14:
“…early in dealing with a metaphor it is
important to reflect on our own experience for whether we acknowledge it or
not, that is where our understanding is rooted”.
Reference: Green,
Barbara (1997 ) Like a Tree Planted: An Exploration of Psalms and Parables
Through Metaphor, printed by The Liturgical Press
