Storyboarding is a funny term in design. When we storyboard in school it has always meant to draw a doodle of what your final boards will look like and that can (kind of) provide a roadmap to what you need to produce. Maybe a more elaborate storyboard process sometimes used is that we sketch out graphics we’ll eventually have and utilize this to see what is missing.
This seems to still miss something that the filmic storyboarding process has. Filmic storyboards allow us to see the narrative more completely (which design storyboards seem to do as well) but they also let us see this story frame by frame, rather than larger snapshots. We get to see the transitions, cuts, camera movement, and details that sew the story together and choreograph the project. It is also something tactile; you can move it around, draw new scenes, suggest edits, etc, rather than being a static vision of what a final presentation will look like.
Design of course doesn’t have the characteristic of moving in such a linear fashion that the film production process can – it would be a mistake to record final proposals to something as permanent as “tape” for instance, or start to manipulate the site by prescribing our thoughts of what the site is on to a storyboard. We want to make room for revisions. We want to make room for the site to always reveal more. So how do we make a more complete design storyboard without being too heavy handed and prescriptive?
Our process (at this point) has been to scope scenes, print pictures, theme-atize and categorize, see what is missing, and to go back for more as we assemble this narrative. This could go forever. What is nice about this process is that you get to see the narrative visually and watch it fill in as we get to know the site more. It breaks apart a gargantuan space into scenes which we can then dissect further. It also allows us to keep more scenes in mind/more balls in the air to juggle, as we try to understand this site more completely. It limits our bias to one inspiring narrative and instead gives us a visual kick in the pants as to what else exists on the site that we could potentially ignore. More minute details are captured in the photos and might mean something entirely different or gain more meaning as this narrative is assembled. The photos allow us to continually revisit and explore the site in a “virtual” space (***just as our exhibit will – is this real vs virtual becoming a thing in the thesis? Or am I making that up and getting excited about random things?).