Best Practices
Project Goal Definition Through Storytelling

by George Elvin, PhD
As adapted from Integrated Practice in Architecture

Summary: Most people are familiar with visioning charrettes, project objectives statements, and scope questionnaires as tools for establishing a common definition of project goals among the client and design/construction team members. In his newly published Integrated Practice in Architecture, George Elvin, PhD, offers another tactic: storytelling.

Goal definition is the first step in integrated project planning, defining how the project will help the owner achieve business or personal goals. Early definition of the owner’s goals by the project team helps keep them foremost throughout the planning, design, and construction of the project. To achieve this, integrators employ a variety of innovative techniques to bring the owner’s representatives, facilities managers, and users together in like mind with the project design and construction team. Some of the more familiar of these techniques include intensive, day-long visioning charrettes, project objective statements, and scope questionnaires.

Another tool frequently employed to capture the project vision is the use of stories, also known as use cases or scenarios of use. Stories are down-to-earth explanations of what future users envision doing in the building. Collected in interviews, they help establish a clear vision that can guide decision making as the design process proceeds.

Develop a virtual experience
UN Studio principals Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos use storytelling to envision life in projects they design, including the Arnhem Central underground car park. “We often use means like storytelling for projecting how the building might be used,” declares UN Studio’s Ben van Berkel. “They’re not just fictive, but describe a little bit of what you experience if you are in the building. It’s a kind of test, almost as if you were to virtually go through the project and see what you might discover.”

And what they might discover can identify the potential for unpleasant experiences. “There’s one story about the station in Arnhem,” van Berkel continues, “about a person who loses everything and cannot find a lost and found desk in the station. Caroline and I just work with it and at the same time put a kind of imagination into what we would like to bring into the world, like sometimes you can do so nicely with music.”

A storytelling example
The Arnhem Central project is a large urban plan development in the Netherlands, the diverse elements of which compose a vibrant transport hub. The expansion includes office space, shops, housing units, a new station hall, a railway platform and underpass, a car tunnel, bicycle storage, and a large parking garage. “A project with such an intricate set of requirements necessitates a methodological approach that can accommodate the hybrid nature of the development,” van Berkel contends. To that end, van Berkel and Bos breathed life into their design by imagining in some storytelling detail the human experience its elements would evoke, including the parking garage:

“When she reached the bottom of the garage the red car was not there. Slowly, Diouma circled the vast, columnless floor, but the three aisles, separated by long, gradient walls, were largely vacant. She left her own car in an empty space in Section 45 and got out. She dashed to the nearest exit and found herself in a huge shaft, vibrant with daylight. There was no one there. She took the lift up to the next floor. Her heart was pounding as she scanned the floor. Once more the space was deserted. She ran to the other side of the building, passing the rough, rocky walls she had seen in her sleep. The crumbly and stony walls seemed incongruous in this land of clay and sand.”

Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons
Reprinted with permission.