The Story

I'm a writer and I'm a designer. These are not, to me, different things at all; just descriptions of the kind of thing I'm good at, but from different directions. I create patentable things such as new user interfaces for mobile devices, and I also create copyrighted things that are made of words and images.

Irene Pereyra is a designer -- and obviously also a writer, as you can see from the page where she presents some of her designs. Next to each one is its story.

This is a wonderful idea; the story places each design in a context, whether dramatically ("i tried to keep the site as simple and elegant as possible..."), biographically ("as an avid jazz fan..."), or another descriptive way ("this is his personal portfolio site...").

My professional work is done in an agile development process, where "user stories" are key foundations for software development. We also think a lot about users, use cases, and personas, which you might also call "characters", "actions", and "motivation".

Just as Brenda Laurel pointed out a few years ago, designing software interfaces is very much like performance -- like cinema on a different kind of film. Film certainly informs my work -- it's a medium that's been around about a century and has a great deal to teach software. Storytelling, of course, is probably as old as humanity, and has even more to teach.

Good designers can almost always tell a good story.