Storytelling in Design

Chapter 5. Defining and Structuring Experiences with Dramaturgy

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Defining and Structuring Experiences with Dramaturgy

Understanding and Defining Your Product Life Cycle

At the same time that I started freelancing back in 2011, my partner and I decided to completely refurbish our apartment and build a loft conversion. It was terrible timing in hindsight, but it taught us a lot. Neither of us had any previous experience with renovations, and we had no idea about all the decisions we’d have to make. We soon found out, though.

The company that was doing the work for us kept asking us to make decisions about this, that, and everything in between. It happened on an almost daily basis and was usually accompanied by a, “We need it by tomorrow morning.” Most of the questions were about aspects we’d never thought about before, such as where to place sockets and light switches. Some of the questions were about things we didn’t even know about, and we often didn’t know what we ought to consider before making a decision. It was a painful process that involved a lot of research online, which in turn was made even more painful as none of the websites we visited catered to our needs or to the stage we were at in our journey.

This is how a typical “Alright, let’s just figure out what type of bath (or insert any other renovation-related item) we should get” experience would go. We’d do a search on Google for “types of baths,” and 99% of those searches took us to websites with a landing page ...