Narrative as Design Process

Sometimes it really does help to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes – or in this case, take a shower in their bathroom.

I am a big-time believer in the power of story telling – creating a narrative – to help solve problems or as a mechanism to educate someone on a thought process. Since a great deal of what I do could be considered ethereal and esoteric, being able to articulate my reasons for solving a problem in a particular way is an important skill. Despite being the design professional, it’s not enough to tell someone “do it my way, it’s better”, you need to be able to walk someone through the design process. One side-effect to feeling the need to “educate” someone as to why your way of doing something might better is that you could come off as condescending or that you aren’t really listening to that person’s reasons for solving the problem they way THEY decided it would be best. To avoid this situation, I have used the process of creating a narrative to help explain what might seem simple or obvious to me in a way that helps the listener understand the process in a way that creates ownership in the end product.

In the simplest of manners, a narrative simply requires the designer to put himself or herself into the role of the end-user, sort of like role-playing (not in the Dungeons & Dragons sort of way). In the example I am showing today, it’s for a residential shower layout that crossed two other people’s desk before it got to me. When I saw it, I knew the shower layout needed to change, but rather than sketch up the solution and hand it off to someone, I thought “let’s make this a teaching moment” … let’s allow someone else discover how pretending to be the client and how they would use the shower in this layout and how that might would work.

The sketch above shows the original shower layout. At first glance, it might not seem like that bad of a shower. There’s plenty of space, there’s a bench for storing shampoo and conditioner, a nice wide door, some options for where the shower head might go … not bad right?

Wrong.

So when you start walking through the narrative you can start to figure out why this shower would be less than it could be (which is code for “terrible”). Here’s the narrative:

You wake up and you decide that you’re going to take a shower. You open the shower door to turn on the water but … based on where the shower head goes, you might have to walk in to the shower to turn the water on. Do you hop onto the bench to avoid that initial blast of cold water? What about that bench? Seems kind of long to me – how much shampoo are you planning on storing? If the shower head is opposite the bench, does the water just hit the back wall and cascade onto the bench? For a big shower, there isn’t all that much room between the shower head and the bench – what happens when you get older and if you might need to be in a wheelchair? Statistically speaking, probably won’t happen but … you’ve got the room but you’re not really using it all that well. You know how when you take a shower you like to have the water hit you right at the base of your neck? That way, part of the water spills over your shoulders and keeps the front part of you warm – this means that you’re actually standing right in front of the shower head. Wait a minute; what’s that uncomfortable thing I’m now standing on? That’s right, the shower drain. 99% of the time it seems the shower drain is place in the middle of the shower, which is exactly where you want to put your foot, and that sucks. The drain ends up in the middle so the slope is minimized but sometimes – depending on the size of your tiles – you get all these extra cuts in your tile pattern that almost always* look terrible.

Here is a sketch of the revised shower layout after we did our virtual walk-through – a few things changed didn’t they? The bench was moved opposite the shower door – it’s still plenty long but it’s not egregiously so. The door into the shower was moved and rotated so that now the door opens up against the wall, making it easier to get in and out of the shower; you don’t have to walk around the door to continue walking into the bathroom. This new door placement also makes it a bit easier to reach in and turn the water on without having to walk all the way into the shower to reach the controls. You will also see that the drain has been moved from the middle of the floor to the edge just in front of the bench – and it’s now a linear slot drain – much cleaner this way and you don’t have to stand on it while showering. The interior of the shower is now large enough to accommodate a wheelchair and allow it to rotate within the shower space – subtle change but effective should the need ever arise.

I have no doubt that the “After” shower is better than the “Before” version, and by creating and walking through a narrative, hopefully everyone else does too.

Cheers and happy showering.

PS – I also think that the reason builder homes (or spec houses) will never be as good as those built for a specific client because the narrative is missing. But that’s a different post for a different day.