Stone, S., 2022.

Telling tales: design thinking through storytelling

Stories are indispensable to human experience; they are instinctual, and we intuitively understand how they work.1 A well-told story can encourage people to look at a specific situation from a different angle - to place themselves in a different position. Storytelling is an effective strategy to encourage students to un- derstand the nature of the design problem that they are undertaking; it allows them to engage imagina- tion with research. It is an instrument not so much for solving problems as for finding them2, and the es- sence of design thinking is creative problem-solving3, so the relationship of narrative thinking to design thinking can be made through analogy.4 This paper documents a project completed by final year Master of Architecture students at the Manches- ter School of Architecture who used the practice of storytelling to generate a design proposal for the new use for a remodelled building. This approach pro- vided a means for the students to engage with the building in both the formal sense - that is with the ty- pology, morphology, materials and construction etc., and also with the more hidden meanings, such as the contentious heritage inherent within the building.