Making things and telling stories
Updated August 16, 2020
As humans, two fundamental activities inform our existence:
We make things to help shape our experience, and
We tell stories about our experience.
Making things and telling stories, while very real in themselves, only echo the experiences they reference, but their existence communicates specific stories about that experience, how it was realized, how it wasn’t, and how it could be. Once we represent an experience through physical artifacts, like tools, or through representational artifacts, like stories, then the original experience ceases to have much importance. The original experience can now be had, with varying degrees of accuracy, by anyone. We share experience. It’s our evolutionary adaptation for survival.
We share experience two ways. We suggest the experience through a physical object, a tool, or we can represent the experience as closely as possible in a story.
Cooking’s a good example. A simple pot is something we could make, a tool, that suggests an experience like eating a meal. The pot’s physical properties communicate what kind of meal we might make; like a soup, perhaps. It also suggests how we might make our soup: pour it in the pot and warm it up. The pot enables us to participate in the experience of eating soup. It may not be the exact soup eaten by whosoever left the pot, but it’s an approximation, and as long as we have a meal, we’re happy.
A recipe, however, tells a detailed story about the soup: what daring pots; the romance between knife and veggies; the long, difficult fight against boiling water. Following a recipe, one also participates in the experience of eating soup, and as long as we follow the recipe, our soup experience will be very close to the original experience. But, once again, the main point is to have a meal.
The thing we make, the physical object suggests what the experience could be and how we can participate. In contrast, the representation of an experience, the story, communicates experience with greater fidelity. But it’s important to note, when I want a meal, I’d rather have a pot than a recipe, and if it comes right down to it, I’d really rather just have the meal. The point of the experience isn’t the cooking, or the recipe, or even the soup. The point is to have a meal.
In one way, the physical object is closer to the experience than the representation. But that closeness comes with constraints. Physical properties limit the experiences we can communicate. If all I have is iron, I can make all the pots I want, and people might eat up a storm, but I’d have trouble suggesting the experience of flying.
Secondly, the object’s affordances limit the experiences we can suggest. We can use a pot for many things: a hat, a pot for soup, a frying pan with deep sides, a hammer. We probably couldn’t use an iron pot for a boat. We can’t use a pot as a needle to make clothes. The objects affordances limit the types of experience we can communicate, or that can be interpreted.
Lastly, the pot is only good if you’ve got one. If you only have enough iron to make 12 pots, then only 12 people at a time can have a pot. If we’ve got 14 people, then two people are out of luck. Likewise, if it takes you one day to make a pot and you can work for five days, then you can only make five pots. The physical nature of the item we make limits the number of people who can share the experience.
The industrial age was largely about improving resource allocation, industrial design, and production methods to overcome physical constraints as much as possible, but Gutenberg demonstrated you don’t need to build a million churches if you can print a million Bibles.
Telling a story lets us get around not having enough iron or not having needles, or not having enough time. A story about soup, a recipe, can be duplicated and shared with as many people who will listen, or who can read it for themselves. You can experience the story more quickly than it takes to prepare, cook, and eat real soup, and you can experience soup even if you don’t have any pots, or any soup for that matter. If experience sharing is our fundamental behavior, it’s no wonder we’ve created information technologies that help us tell stories more quickly and efficiently.
In a world of stories, the only constraints on the types of experiences we can share are the knowledge needed to create the story, the time it takes to share the story, and imagination. This differs significantly from objects where physical properties constrain much of what we can do.
We have only slightly more experience making things than we do telling stories, but for the last several hundred years, we’ve focused on better ways to make things, from pots all the way to soup in a can. But story-telling hasn’t evolved very much. We use words to communicate our knowledge to someone. Listening to the story communicates the experience of the story. However with the evolution of information technology over the past several decades, we now have access to not only a much greater body of information, but we can now see this information in parallel, in comparison, in a way that creates knowledge. All of a sudden, I don’t have to live in Italy to know how to make Tuscan soups. I don’t even have to walk down to the library to learn about it. I can search for “Tuscan soup” and learn enough to start writing my own recipes, or repeating someone else’s recipes in a matter of minutes.
Each method for sharing experience has its advantages and disadvantages, and separating the two is mostly an academic exercise, but it describes why business is changing, why design has risen to greater prominence, and why design is emerging as the fundamental business unit in today’s organizations. I’ll blather about that next.
