Unpacking Stories to Serve People Better
Taught by Indi Young.
A friend and I were talking about movies. She goes frequently and I hardly go at all. I was full of curiosity about her moviegoing world. She was talking about how she was selective about which movies she’ll see with friends “as a social thing” and which movies she prefers to see alone. I asked her what the difference was for her. She replied, “I find that friends tend to taint the movie for me. They won’t see it the way I do. Maybe they’ll have a comment that I’m not feeling at the moment and I find it distracting or maddening. I like to be completely immersed during the film. Usually the topic will move me and I’ll have a strong reaction. That’s another reason I don’t want anyone with me, or they’d see me crying. But I think that’s what the director wanted. I’m trying to get the full experience the director wanted the audience to have.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, so I prompted her to explain. She said, “I wrote a play in college. Some people did get it and some people didn’t. I thought, ‘Were they not paying attention?’ It’s out of respect. That’s what I would want if was a movie maker.” My friend prefers to see movies alone so that she can give the director her full attention and receive the experience that was intended. It’s a philosophy she holds, partially because as a student she discovered that the audience for her own play wasn’t paying complete attention and she knew how frustrating that felt. If my friend hadn’t been so willing to unpack her preferences for me, I wouldn’t have discovered this philosophy, just the preference, “I like to see films alone.”
Much research stops at this preference level. There is so much more to learn about people. Knowing the philosophies and emotions that drive their behavior helps you understand and serve them better. If you learn to listen and notice where you make assumptions about what people are saying or doing, you can learn to dig deeper. If you can develop empathy for a particular group of people, if you can try on their ideals and their way of making decisions, then you can create situations and tools and access that will brighten their world.
In this workshop, you will learn to:
- Ask why enough times to peel back the layers
- Recognize when you are making assumptions
- Convert stories into a mental model
- Support people better by filling in gaps in the model
April 24th, 2008 at 8:06 am
[…] also added workshops. Adaptive Path founder and book author Indi Young will teach how to Unpack Stories to Serve People Better. CMU Design professor Mark Baskinger will follow up his excellent article in the latest […]