Maeve Catherine

I’ve created stories for short films, posters, websites, and more because I love to experiment with visual design but I wouldn’t call myself an expert yet.

Many visuals are up for interpretation and revision which I’ve explored most through methods such as a storyboard and, more recently, design fiction. Ellen Lupton dives into how designers of many industry’s create stories in her book, “Design is Storytelling”.

Storyboards

As a former film student, I have lots of experience with storyboarding existing films and short films I was working on. The first storyboards I created were in high school, as part of the preproduction process of creating a mock Diet Pepsi advertisement. Amanda Walgrove, at Canva, explains the a storyboard can tell the story of actions through a series of pictures, which requires designers to understand the actions and progression that they want the story to take.

Similar to a narrative arc and story structures, storyboards should include an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. However a storyboard breaks down each of these components into multiple panels of detailed drawings.

For the Diet Pepsi ad, my classmates and I storyboarded the process of someone taking a can out of a mini fridge, placing a can on a round about table, wiping off the condensation, slowly opening the can for consumption, and having the can spin as it “exploded”. This action is evidently easy to explain through words but through drawn out panels with short camera directions and framing instructions we could create a visual representation of the outcome we wanted to create.

Design Fiction

Design Fiction is defined at the process of imagining and drawing prototypes based on specific criteria. The goal is to have a visual representation of the ideas for a future projects. Common criteria topics to start creating from are arc (time period), Terrain (the contextual setting), and object (type of product), and sometimes mood is defined too.

Through the game The Thing from the Future I was able to work my way through design fiction with my peer Will. We met on zoom to play Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson’s storytelling game with the three basic cards of arc, terrain, and object. With the generated prompts we each created our own prototypes, which turned out to be somewhat similar.

For the first round the cards were “Collapsed Future”, “Oil”, and “Game”. After about 10 minutes of independently working we came back together and shared our ideas. I shared that I thought about the Disney video game “Where’s My Water” at first but than worried about how much technology would work in a collapsed future so I changed my idea. Instead I came up with an all for one and one for all type of situation where the American people would need to work in groups, within their state, to create a new solution to making oil rigs. The solution can be collaborated with among states but there is only an allocated amount of material for all teams. This process continued two more times with new cards.

Take a look at my ideas!