Jan 16, 20202 min read

Digital Storytelling

When I think of digital storytelling, what I have been most familiar with are podcasts. I love listening to This American Life, Hidden Brain, and some of the other NPR podcasts. A particular favorite is 99% Invisible, because the stories cover topics ranging from design, urbanism, to visual art, sound and music, to technology. One can listen to the stories, but also read text and view visual images on the site.

Another new aspect of digital storytelling is the creation of short video stories based on text. The New York Times columns Modern Love and Diagnosis have both been made into video, which tell compelling stories in a serial format. The New York Times has also introduced augmented reality features into its coverage, which allows news stories and features to come off the page and into your space. One of the most visually interesting is the article about David Bowie’s costumes that correlated with an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018. While the exhibition was quickly sold out, AR made it possible to bring the costumes into one’s own space.

So, how can I incorporate digital storytelling into a meaningful tool in my classroom? Further research turned up Making Spaces Meaningful Through Architectural Storytelling, an article about an event curated by the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Designers used film, video game creation, animation, drawing, and interactive storytelling to create understanding of architectural and spatial design. Artist Catrina Stewart used architectural drawings and hand built models to create a video game with a narrative.

Kibwe Tavares, a filmmaker, compared the process of designing the spaces of a film to the process of architectural design.

Architecture and urban design is so much more than static plan drawings on sheets of paper, and moving forward I hope to encourage the use of new media for students to tell the stories of their architectural designs.