The Pocket Universal Methods of Design, Revised and Expanded

042	Directed Storytelling

Gathering rich stories of lived experiences using narrative conversational prompts

• Directed storytelling is rooted in narrative inquiry, whereby researchers understand people and document their experiences from personal stories.
• It starts with a prompt by the researcher to the storyteller: “Tell me a story about the last time you . . .”
• Additional guiding questions are posed in terms of who, what, when, where, and how, to keep the storyteller in a comfortable narrative flow.
• Ideas emerging from stories can be clustered using affinity diagramming, looking for consistent patterns and themes within and across experiences.
• Themes that characterize experiences can be modeled into a tangible framework, with maps ...