Storytelling in Design

[ Preface ]

It All Starts with “Once upon a time…”

I grew up in a family where stories were always told. My dad, Ingvar, is a writer, and reading and writing played a big part in my childhood. I remember sitting next to my dad on the sofa with one of my brothers on the other side. Dad would read us the Moomin books, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Astrid Lindgren, and we’d sit there completely absorbed.

The stories he read sent us on journeys to places we didn’t know existed. They created worlds in our minds and sparked our imaginations by making us see things we’d never seen before. As with a dream you don’t want to wake up from, we never wanted those reading sessions to stop. We wanted to know what would happen next, how it all began, and how it was going to end. Evening after evening, we’d get one step closer until the final page was turned and it was time to start a new chapter, sometimes in a new book.

Many of the classic fairy tales from our childhoods, like Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, and Hansel and Gretel, start with one of the most widely known sentences in the world: “Once upon a time…” According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase has been used in one form or another since at least 1380 to introduce narratives of past events, typically in the form of fairy tales and folktales. During the 1600s, it became commonly used as a way to begin oral narratives and often ended with “...and they all lived happily ever after.” ...