Snack or banquet? Telling stories in digital spaces
This month's blog is based on a Lightning Talk that Briar gave earlier this week at the 2020 National Digital Forum Conference.
In mid-2020 we received an email from a curator from the National Museum of Singapore:
“As museums in Singapore have been closed … we’ve had to take our programmes and content digital. It’s got us thinking about the capabilities that we need to build up in the long run, recognising that effective storytelling across different media will be a core competency for our curators.”
They wanted us to run an online workshop for 15 staff from ten different Singapore museums, with participative activities that would help them develop confidence in storytelling across different media, for both physical and online digital experiences.
We landed on 5 main questions for the workshop and based the content around our basic storytelling rules and tools:
Who says a space can't tell a story!
Why are stories important?
What makes a good story?
What are different types of stories?
How does storytelling change across different media?
How does digital storytelling differ from spatial storytelling?
We defined story as a machine for engaging human attention by presenting reality to us in a form that we can understand made of almost anything - words, images, objects, spaces…
So then, if a story is a machine, it must have moving parts. How many? What's the minimum possible size of a story?
Here we refer to the Rule of Three, a principle that suggests that a trio of events or characters is more satisfying, or effective than any other number. It's more memorable because three is the smallest number to create a pattern. You can see this rule at work in story structures - Beginning, middle, end - or many slogans.
The Rule of Three in action
There are really only two ways to engage visitors’ attention with a story. You can move people emotionally - with laughter or tears. Or just be interesting.
The voice in which the story is told is a powerful element of engagement. Placing a person at the centre humanizes it and drives visitor empathy.
Bubble diagrams are handy for plotting the basic shape and arrangement of a story.
How you know you're telling a good story....
Using a storytelling “lean canvas” that we invented, participants applied the techniques to create interesting stories about mundane things. Then they had to plan a story for a collection object told via a digital medium. We were blown away by the intriguing ideas that they generated!
We shared and discussed examples of digital storytelling projects from around the world. There were many imaginative, fun examples of short form digital storytelling and beautiful projects with great design features.
Click the images to explore some of the best examples of digital storytelling that we found!
We struggled to find longer form digital projects that we could imagine visitors spending time doing in the same way that people take in a physical exhibition. A museum visit can be measured in hours. But digital interactions are usually only seconds. With digital interactions, you are competing for a visitor’s attention with the entire Internet!
So it’s more important than ever to think about the voice in which the story is told, or the persona of the storyteller. Much of the time the point of digital stories is actually to tell people who you are and what you do. You are reaching out and when you do that, you and your institution in a sense become the real story.