Appealing as the idea of narrative is in design (or any other come to that) dimensions of a project, the end result of that thinking usually translates as the ’telling’.

And storytelling has such a lovely, human, inclusive and including sense, the charm is self- evident. 

But then I heard a thing on the radio (which I think might have been Natalie Haynes ‘Stands-up For The Classics?’) about Aesop (the fabulist rather than the chi-chi soaps-n-things maker who’s wares seem a ubiquitous dressing feature in show homes now. Or maybe the show homes I visit.)

Despite him being attributed to something like a hundreds of the morality tales, he didn’t write that many. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with that - I mean, if you’re famous enough to create an entire genre of something, good on everyone claiming something you didn’t do was down to you. 

But the moral of this particular story was that Greeks at the time (according to my hazy recall of Ms Haynes line of debate) was that the writers (orators, more accurately?) coined themselves as ’storymakers’. 

As designers, I think it’s easy to perhaps overlook the ‘making’ side of our mental musculature (perhaps because design is done down as a thing.) 

Though as ‘storymakers’, there’s a much more robust and practiced and practical place to stake-out the importance of the thing design does really, really well - in the ‘making’.

Most can tell a story, and some have a great gift for being able to do that. But beyond recalling, being able to make one? Now there’s a vocation.