Thursday, March 11, 2010

Design 101: What's Your Story?



What's Your Story?  If your answer involves some hand-waving and referring to some cool new technological gadget in your lobby, I'm afraid you've lost me (and probably a large portion of your audience.)

Gizmos are NOT a story, but merely one possible way to tell a story.  Simple right?  You would think so, but unfortunately the siren-song of shiny, techy goodness often has a way of getting people to forget about, or rationalize away, their core messages (The Story!) that they want to impart.

Recently,  I've been in Helena, Montana working with the fine folks at ExplorationWorks Museum and I also attended the excellent SMartCAMP conference in NYC.  As I look back at my activities in both of these disparate situations, it is interesting to think about how many times the notion of "telling your story" or "staying on message" recurred.

If the notion of "story" is central to thinking about the next steps in the evolution of a nascent museum in Montana, and the common thread in the discussions of the social media hipsters at SMartCAMP, then I ask again, "What's Your Story?"

And are you spending enough time honing and polishing it to engage your audience with it?

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