Life in Story Space

The fundamental unit of human experience is the story.

How's that for bottom line up front? I've been obsessed with stories all my life, but since reading (repeatedly) Robert McKee's "Story", I've been thinking about stories in different ways. For me it laid out a way of looking at stories, built from their fundamental building blocks. It provided a framework for de-constructing stories, or creating new stories, that seemed to make sense to me on some deeper level.

Since then I've started to see stories everywhere, and I now believe there are profound lessons that can be learned from this approach. All of our memories of the past and dreams of the future are stories we are writing about ourselves. If a human being is alive, they are making stories. So to understand stories is to understand how humans see themselves and their place in the world.

So this blog will be about Life in Story Space. I will be looking at how story logic can be used as a framework for different kinds of problems, and hopefully providing some insights on a wide range of topics. I hope the content here gives you a unique way of looking at the world, and at the power of stories.

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Rise of the Context Shifters

Who are the Context Shifters? There's a good chance you're one already. I know I am. Just count how many devices you use to frequently access a single product/service? I use five for Twitter, and my guess is that's not even a high number.

When you have a single desktop PC, you have a single context. You sit in the one place and use a mouse and a keyboard to run desktop applications. The types of information and tools within an application are largely fixed. User centred design at least puts the user in the picture, but the frame is still quite small.

Fast forward to users carrying more than one internet enabled device on their person at all times, and a PC within reach for more than half of their waking life.

An application can now be thought of as an application space, encompassing all of the possible user contexts. Individual users don't have a single context, they shift contexts within the same application space. This is more than just an extension of a single session, moving from device to device. Context encompasses everything about an interaction with an application, so as my context changes, I want the app to respond accordingly.

This gives rise to the concept of "Context Loss" - the inconvenience a user may experience when switching contexts. This might only be a minor inconvenience, or it could be significant enough for a user to choose a to use only a single context in the future. Application design should include frictionless context shifting as a goal. Minimising Context Loss will help to embed an application in a users life, making it sticky and less likely to be abandoned.

Twitter

Rain falls clean as thought, Muddied soon by intermingling, Follow where you will.

Airbnb

Now a tired wish, No stranger to a weary mind, Welcome now to rest.

Flutter Lyon

Flutter words and ink, Confetti plays on sexy minds, Tattoed with wonder