Design and the telling of stories are practices that are not often thought of in the same category; but together with colleagues at eca and Napier University I am pursuing a number of projects that explore the relationship between these two creative practices.
Through a series of papers I have explored the scripting of products and lifestyles, products as props, plot devices, and dramatic product genres, investigating how Product Designers embed future narratives in the products they design. Users and consumers find themselves the unwitting stars of a 'Filmic Narrative' devised by an unseen director: the designer.
These explorations of the ways in which form follows fiction challenge the old stories that are told about design, in which more deterministic conception of programme, function, or construction hold sway over design. They aim, cumulatively, to construct a new narrative for the design process (and product) that engages more fully with things and spaces as we actually experience and make them.
My colleague Ed Hollis and I have been commissioned to design and curate 'Form Follows Fiction Follows Form: A Cycle of Tales about Things, Spaces and Places' . This event to be held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in May and June 2007 will aim to break out of the traditional modes of design exhibition and reveal design discourses to the general public. This is done through the disarmingly simple and accessible medium of the story bringing something of the spontaneity and sense of occasion of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to the Six Cities Design festival. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication edited by Alex Milton and Ed Hollis.