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The Hero’s Journey of Open Design

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Gunther • 24 Comments

Len’s recent post on Maslow’s Internet Hierarchy of Needs (a real gem) got me thinking about one of the greatest needs in the marketplace today: The ability to tell transformative brand and product stories through design. Or, to design transformative brands, products and services through narrative.

Quite a lot has been written lately about the importance of storytelling with respect to building organizations and brands. Open Design Now is one platform Lance Weiler turned me onto that touches on the functional elements of co-creation. Lance’s work already utilizes this type of thinking in how stories are collaboratively generated, and the work we’ve done with WSWP (Wicked Solutions for Wicked Problems) is all about applying this to various business and educational contexts.

I’m jazzed about this because I think mass industry is really turning a corner in how it looks at innovation as a fluid, ongoing process. In this realm, creativity is embraced as an iterative input or output (with increased responsibility) and addresses how companies can manage scarcity, incrementally create abundance, and produce large-scale, reciprocal economic benefits. It also acknowledges a stronger shift towards the socialization of products and services, which underpins the notion of (and buzz around) social business, as well as “networked investment” (a construct I am working on with the partners at K5 Ventures).

The Internet and respective social technologies, of course, play a significant role in this shift. But it’s the nexus of emerging behavior via shared story that’s the real linchpin.

I’ve borrowed from the great Joseph Campbell to illustrate it here, and these themes will be blown out in a specific use case for both commons and commercial licenses in my upcoming book, A Literacy of the Imagination.

What do you think? What would you add or change?

Filed Under: Creativity and Ownership, Storytelling, technology
  • http://www.rickliebling.com Rick Liebling

    Gunther, this is terrific thinking. Here’s my question for you, and maybe I’m shortchanging people, but, how do you get the average brand manager to look at this without his/her eyes glazing over? How do you get them to accept this concept and buy into the idea? This is a long-term play, not something that is likely to return dividends by the end of the week.

    Does there need to be / is there another layer, a sugary coating if you will, that helps a brand manager digest this?

    • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

      Good question. Short answer: I wouldn’t expect that the average bear would willingly engage in this. But here’s the thing — it’s not really so much that they have to accept the “concept”, it’s a framework for understanding why the brand/consumer/product relationship thing is in constant evolution, whether it’s a week, one month or several years.

      The idea is that if you are constantly refining, then you are at once “safe” but also on the edge of innovation. The narrative elements are just guideposts.

      To that end, I suppose the actions could be whittled down to just three or four as the “layer” (value prop, suspending disbelief, new approach, utility, etc.)

      • brendan howley

        Gunther’s collaborator Brendan here: I’d suggest the answer to Rick’s excellent question is recursive—the personal journey ‘along the edge of innovation’ is no different from the institutional. That’s how you make this relatable; moreover, I disagree that there’s an average brand manager, any more than there’s ‘an average guy in the street’. What’s wonderful about this model is its inclusivity—and the fact it adapts to any setting, any business, any brand.

        I’d suggest the personal journey amplifies the argument (as does Chris Vogler’s Campbell ‘homage’ THE WRITER’S JOURNEY) that all creativity (a child’s, a designer’s, a financier’s) follows a archetypal human path. Arthur Koestler’s THE ACT OF CREATION is an excellent signpost for this thinking.

        A brand is nothing more than an expectation: a story half-told, awaiting its next page. But ally that with user data exposed by ongoing conversations around a brand story…and you’ve a predicate for much more than creativity: you’ve a predicate to identify emerging markets on the basis of the value co-created by those in conversation. That can be volunteerism, a joint venture, a crowdfunding, the collision of two businesses…or even a UX, the closest approximation to the pure distillation of shared story into design there is: http://uxmag.com/strategy/why-we-need-storytellers-at-the-heart-of-product-development.
        What’s truly staggering about this conversation (beyond WWTID) is that entire companies have no idea of the significance of their own story—and have never shared it in detail with critical suppliers or strategic partners. I live in Stratford, a small SW Ontario town with literally dozens of small feeder plants cheek-by-jowl. Their B2B intelligence is woeful; one world-class operation literally has no idea what it’s lead local supplier actually does process-wise. How can any business expect to add value to a supplier partnership if they’re that wilfully blind?
        So (to end my rant), there’s far more than creativity: there’s business intelligence, which is how you hook the marketing guy.

        • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

          What he said ;)

  • Randy

    I worry that an ersatz Joseph Campbell model for open design might be limiting. In particular, I worry that emerging storytellers (always looking for handy tools) might rely on (and misapply) your model – without realizing that other tools are actually better suited to the needs of their open design work. Please understand, I appreciate the thought that has gone into your illustration. It is provocative. And we definitely need more signposts and tools to help us as we move forward using open design. But imposing the linearity of the Hero’s Journey onto open design – especially at this stage – might just do more harm than good. For example, the numbers around the edge of your circle imply that 8 (crisis, death and rebirth) will invariably follow 3 (mentorship) and 4 (suspended disbelief). Why? If the recent interest in transmedia storytelling has taught us anything, it’s to build for multiple points of entry and unique pathways through a story world. I worry that (just as with Joseph Campbell) a dumbed-down application of your ideas will encourage practitioners to make collaborative storytelling that runs on predetermined rails. Why limit brand storytelling that proceeds via open design to a linear model? I realize that you haven’t offered this illustration as the one true path. But young storytellers want heuristic examples. Can we at least offer other models to young storytellers at the same time (here’s a hammer – but it won’t work in all situations, so here’s a screwdriver too). Have you considered that harnessing the collective intelligence to create useful new things through public sharing of information isn’t always about scalable utility (or returning home with a boon)? If it helps you as a paradigm for your work, or furthers the conversation, that’s great. And I appreciate the tool. But I want to make sure its place in the toolbox is considered too.

    • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

      Hi Randy — these are all great questions and valid concerns, and the very reason why I threw this out there. Thank you for this input.

      That said, I’m not sure this “imposes linearity” but rather shifts the emphasis on development from channels and platforms to actual narrative levers. Remove the numbers in the graphic and simply imagine that these are just checkpoints that can happen at any time. Are there better tools? I would hope so. But as a framework for discovery and refinement, show me one commonly recognized tool or commercially viable model that focuses on brand, product and story.

      That’s what I’m going after with the “collective”. And I don’t think young storytellers are at jeopardy here; quite the opposite, they have much more thinking to do, as we all do.

      You mention transmedia storytelling — sure, you can have multiple entry points in a storyworld, but does it mean that storytellers and participants in that world have a solid narrative structure in place to nurture behaviors and outcomes? Are media assets designed uniquely for this? Are they actually measurable (KPIs, performance, box office, etc.). More important, does a brand really understand its role in that arc or multiple arcs, or, how the product would be profitable to the business as a result?

      I would argue that in most cases, no.

      As examples on opposite ends of the “brand spectrum”, Ford is running a “transmedia campaign” and franchises like Toy Story, Batman and Men in Black are running “branded transmedia initiatives” of their own. However, I struggle to find the narrative aspects of what this entails beyond just good marketing — how do storytellers actually develop the equities of the brand through multiple characters and storylines? How do participants shape these story elements to evolve the brand and product, and vice versa?

      In other words, why does anyone give a shit about a storyworld, let alone a product or a brand if we haven’t taken deeper story considerations into product design, franchise or not? How about in experience design? I rarely ever hear experience designers talking about narrative in, say, their application development. Game mechanics, yes. Narrative, not so much. And the funny thing is, game mechanics are already resident in narrative structures! (why the need to “gamify”?)

      And nevermind “transmedia” for a moment, do young storytellers have enough of a grasp of narrative structure to even know how to develop stories across channels and platforms? If we want storytelling as a general practice to move beyond these marketing or film or TV buckets, then it seems we need to go back to brass tacks. Hence, the Campbell exploration. It’s a start.

      Part of this is to simply say that whatever we want to use as a guidepost — Campbell on a more linear track, or Kieslowski on another — brands and their respective products and services can be developed as an iterative design process (or system of processes) based on narrative. The other part is to say, look, brands, consumers and products can be a part of the same process of business scale. From there, the choice in approach and responsibility is yours, including how the design manifests as media.

      • http://www.facebook.com/gmdclark Brian Clark

        Hey, Gunther — noodling this around, but my cautions are like Randy’s. Needs more baking time for me to get the critique correct, but here’s the abstract from a phenomenology point of view.

        Unless the brand is an explicit narrative object, with something like a beginning / middle / end, than the experience of narrative isn’t as cyclical as that. Campbell was dealing with the linearity of storytelling.

        What you do have here is an outline of what makes a brand experience compelling enough that people would want to share it and a story about their experience. In that, the story that belongs to the brand customers rather than the brand … wouldn’t you really want the brand to appear about the death/rebirth cycle?

        Is the brand really the protagonist of the “story”, or is the customer (and the brand is an object inside that narrative that helps them complete THEIR journey?)

        • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

          Hi Brian — good points; I actually do think that the brand can be an explicit narrative object (hence the alignment of product/consumer/brand in the middle) and that the experience of narrative IS cyclical -> beginning/middle/open end –>> rebirth/middle/new beginning (or something like that). I get that Campbell dealt with linearity, but what I’m borrowing from is his notion of arc and archetype, and to me that is cyclical, and as such the roles vary between consumer, brand and/or product.

          To your last question, if brands are co-owned by consumers (which I think they are), then they can also both be protags. (yes? maybe?)

          Maybe the a clearer articulation would be to run the cycle through rebirth, as you suggest, and then break out roles per instance (specific product case, specific brand case, specific media case, etc.)

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  • http://twitter.com/maya_z00 Maya zuckerman

    Its great that you have written this as I have been using his modality to start working on better brand narratives. There is also a great book by Jonah Sachs – Winning the Story Wars that really works with Cambell’s philosophy and brings some great insight of the modern day myth gap.
    Great stuff as always:)

    • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

      Hi, Maya! Thanks for this — I’ve been keen to dive deeper into Sach’s unique thinking — Lance and Brian (Clark) had mentioned it a couple of conversations ago. The material I’m developing with Brendan Howley and Sasha Grujicic will not only use these elements in an actual use case, but we will develop a strong economic position for why and how stories actually drive markets and can affect GDP with demonstrable returns.

      • http://twitter.com/maya_z00 Maya zuckerman

        Gunther – that sounds really exciting and will be happy to hear and see more as you guys progress. I completely believe that we believe our stories and myths in a way that changes the actual political, social and business environment we live and share. My life experiment is how to create a storyworld I want to live in – in reality and I am fascinated how that can proven on whole social-economic systems.

  • Randy

    With respect: Some of the comments to this thread are already suggesting how a reliance on prior models can be limiting.

    For example, @Brendan repeats the (basically unsupported?) implication left by Vogler that “all creativity (a child’s, a designer’s, a financier’s) follows a archetypal human path.”

    Really? “All creativity?” One path?

    While no one would argue that many linear stories follow the paradigm of the Hero’s Journey – Vogler’s expansion of Campbell’s model to describe all human creativity is the type of reductivist foolishness that might (as we move forward with new non-linear forms) do more harm than good.

    Once again, I think Gunther’s model and the comments here represent essential steps. And I don’t want to stand in the way of progress. Old World structures and some (basically untested) ideas about the future are all we have to build on. But, before engaging in a debate about who is the “protagonist” in Open Design or how a linear narrative can be imposed on brand storytelling, can we really analyze the utility of those terms and concepts in the New World of storytelling?

    For example the concept of a “protagonist” originated in the Greek theater, a form of linear storytelling that took place before an audience that by definition entered and left the story together. As I tried to suggest in my prior post, the differences between that type of storytelling and Open Design are not insignificant.

    In the Greek tradition, the first character to speak – literally proto=first and agonist=player – was always the main character. No variation. That convention is not hard-wired into storytelling. But it took risk-takers to point that out. When a new technology (the printing press) changed storytelling – and linear storytelling began to take on new forms (the novel) – some storytellers analyzed and reconsidered the conventions before imposing them on the new forms of storytelling. For example, with the birth of the novel, the term “protagonist” evolved to include narrators who were not necessarily the main character (e.g., Nick in The Great Gatsby). This sort of reconsideration of formal storytelling rules is what I’m hoping for today as a new technology (the web) allows us to explore the potential for non-linear storytelling.

    By happy accident, we are alive at the moment when the models for collaborative storytelling and the new forms that might accompany it are being explored and tested. Before we rush ahead and impose (poorly understood) terms like “narrative,” “protagonist,” and “Hero’s Journey” on the new forms – can we consider where they come from, what they really mean and how they might and might not have utility?

    The Hero’s Journey clearly describes a universal human paradigm for a certain type of linear story. But is the Hero’s Journey the only paradigm for storytelling? Must every story have a protagonist?

    I acknowledge that many brands will want to retain control and tell their messages as linear stories with a protagonist, but Gunther’s model is about Open Design in a distributed network – a platform uniquely suited for non-linear stories – so I worry about imposing structures based exclusively on the conventions of Old World linear storytelling.

    • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

      Randy: I think we’re saying similar things in different ways, and again, your concerns are not only legitimate, but very insightful.

      To be clear (for anyone reading this thread), this isn’t a model, a de facto “here’s the (one) new way to introduce narrative into product and brand development” — it’s an idea, a beginning, some semblance of a framework, what have you.

      Is the Hero’s Journey the only paradigm for storytelling, or should every story have a protagonist? I should hope not! (The presidential debates don’t seem to have one…)

      And as for a brand, I do firmly agree with what Brendan has said — it is a story half-told, awaiting its next page. Similarly, products have often seem to take on this “half-life”.

      So, let’s build off of what you said here: “Before we rush ahead and impose (poorly understood) terms like “narrative,” “protagonist,” and “Hero’s Journey” on the new forms – can we consider where they come from, what they really mean and how they might and might not have utility?”

      YES, let’s do just that (please) — that is the point of this exercise.

      And as I value your input, what would you suggest are the roles they play to refine this idea? Should we introduce different phases ala the Dialectics, Vokler and/or Kieslowski? What about Fromberg or Bloch? Should we look at Platonian hard and soft text? Can this help us create something that is actually non-linear in function and execution?

      As important, is it portable or extensible across disciplines in design, engineering, web and media creation? What about investing, such as private or venture capital? (We don’t have to answer that quite yet… ;)

      Again, my intention is to match up storytelling and design — more meaningfully and sustainably — in the development of a product and/or a service, and what that can entail in the relationship between a consumer and a brand. I think this is a core problem of industry in general, and frankly, why markets (often containing great ideas) aren’t sustainable.

      • http://finchclasses.blogspot.com/ Randy

        @Gunther I sincerely appreciate your request for input.

        Like you (and so many other admired colleagues) I am struggling to identify tools that will help as storytelling evolves across the distributed network. Much of my time is spent exploring monetization in this new model. But I am also intrigued by the narrative opportunities and challenges. And, like you, I spend a lot of time looking to the past. Perhaps that’s why I’m reminded today of what a pioneering storyteller of the past said (jokingly?) about requests for input:

        “As a general rule…people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.” – Alexandre Dumas

        I know your motives in asking for advice are better than that. So here’s a link to two recent posts about the role of “theme” and “plot without conflict”:

        http://bit.ly/OWPnVl

        Not much help I know.

        Unfortunately, when I think about the tools that might help New World storytellers, I often come up with more questions than answers. Perhaps that’s why I tend to be skeptical of simple storytelling paradigms that purport to answer a bunch of New World storytelling questions. In the words of another pioneering storyteller:

        “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” – Lewis Carroll

        • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

          All good, my friend. I will check out these links and will incorporate all of this feedback into a “next version” of this idea… ;)

  • http://twitter.com/thorstone137 Dustin Goerndt

    First, I would say that the concern for linearity can be just as inductive as the model suggested here. Either one’s validity depends on experience. In that sense both are legit. But, the reality I already know to be true is that absolute linearity is the end of creation. I would safely say that’s not happening any time soon. So yes, we’re all on the “one” linear path of discovery, experience, and death.

    Campbell shows us the hero’s boon is what offers redemption and rebirth. It’s what saves the day when the utility has run it’s course. Redemption lies in the ability to accept the path and build the utility even though you know it can’t last. It’s simply the ability to talk about that fact. When brands allow these possibilities to be introduced into the narrative it then becomes possible for the brand and customer to save each other. Both become Hero’s.

    The only real protagonists are the ones that deny the imaginative ideas around them. The mistakenly think they’re the hero’s by knocking them down as fast as they can or putting up walls to keep them out.

    @Gunther’s model is unsurprisingly similar to my own model for what I call the social arbor. The hypothesis is that you can achieve social innovation (valuable/productive social experience) consistently by building the right balance of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital with in your market. All of which happens via iterative marketing through a story narrative based closely on the model @Gunther has presented here. The hard part to fully grasp is that we are both the brand and the consumer.

    I think it’s possible to identify touch points that can tell a brand when ideas(creativity) gain acceptance(inductive qualification) in your market and when they have run their course. Good ideas can become tools(deductive quantification) and tools can create utilities. From there the correct alignment of your utilities(creative capital) and market trends(intellectual capital) is where the potential for true social innovation happens.

    We already see this happening when a start-up builds a piece of software out of an open scripting language to solve an in house problem and then releases it to the market(http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/). I won’t say bootstrap is a social innovation. But, I can’t deny that it has potential to being a part of one.

    • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

      Dustin – thank you for this very thoughtful commentary. I would love to learn more about your ‘social arbor’ construct, and you also introduce critical elements into this mix — the notions of social capital (what reciprocal benefit comes out of brand/consumer/product interactions?) creative capital (what engenders an elicit response in the form of conversation or media creation or product creation) and intellectual capital (that which is produced containing the previous two elements, and that which has both commercial and cultural value of scale).

      If I understand you correctly, what you point to also may be the elements that illustrate just how we are both brand and consumer, and how brands and consumers are equally responsible for the relationships they have to products and services.

      • http://twitter.com/thorstone137 Dustin Goerndt

        Thanks Gunther.

        The notion came to me a couple years ago as I was surfing through web pages on the ‘tree of life’ in the context of the torah and kabbalah. I’m a very right brained guy and enjoy creative exercises so I chose to try and reinterpret it’s nodes as elements of design.

        My first attempt was exciting. It was almost serendipitous the way my current work seemed to just fall into it’s own predestined place. However, as I’m more of a self-taught enthusiast enjoying ‘productive leisure’, trying to wrap my head around a path of experience(or work flow) has been a little more challenging. But, well worth it. :)

        I’ve yet to achieve a complete proof of concept. But, I have accumulated evidence and tools on the open web that would seem to satisfy the elements needed to complete the process. In fact, by being here and sharing I’ve taken it one step closer.

        I call it an arbor because I see it as a framework to seed and grow your digital ecosystem. It’s ‘your’ social hub and where you store your social capital.

        There has been a lot of discussion over data portability and for a long time it was my biggest hang up. I firmly believed that the social objects left behind on the web had value and must be considered ours. Why should facebook make a billion dollars off our social experiences. That didn’t seem right. But, then I realized that when I go to the mall and by a pop and shake Sally’s hand, that experience isn’t just mine and it would be impossible to think I could some how erase it or download it so that the evidence of my purchase and social interaction was removed just because I decided I wanted it to be unknown. We must accept that if we don’t what to be held accountable for an action then we shouldn’t do it.

        As I share here, my comments are posted as tweets and from there my tweets are posted to my WordPress based arbor(not yet actually, but the functionality is there). A brand that is fully engaged in the social space can generate a lot more data than just likes and click through. Almost all social activity generates some form of RSS feed and I believe RSS has a coming resurgence.

        With a brands social activity stored in your own database you then have the potential to text-mine for trends and keywords giving you the tools to serve up relevant new media that can, from a brand management or product management point of view, ask very specific questions as to quantify your deductions and or qualify your inductions. This in turn satisfies the required framework needed to support new ideas as suggested by Jon Kolko in his book Exposing the Magic of Design.

        In theory, I’ve already begun investing(or risking) social capital in hopes that my ideas are socially correct(by correct, I mean valuable or useful in some way to someone) and I’m not laughed off the web. If they are correct then I can move forward and these very discussions accumulate and become social stock that might one day validate the potential of a yet to be conceived product or service.

  • http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld

    Folks: @brendanhowley pointed me to this article from 2010 (a two-part series) on UX and storytelling. I think it touches nicely on the Hero’s Journey from a narrative design perspective, save for how the brand-consumer-product alignment serves as the nexus (which is sort of the point of this exercise, but anyway…).

    http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/29/better-user-experience-using-storytelling-part-one/

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  • http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/ gravity7

    Interesting stuff!

    Couple high level thoughts:

    1) In the good tradition of post-modernism, and using contemporary sociology, anthropology, and media theory, one has to ask: What is the nature of the narrative in this medium? (Social and mass media, assuming also other brand communication “channels”)

    2) Assuming that it is not only the construction or tradition or even linguistic/discursive “meaning construction” of narrative that interests us, we have to acknowledge that the medium indeed makes a difference. To wit, the medium permits communication.

    3) One now has to determine whether it is narration or communication that we’re talking about. Certainly, communication can take narrative forms. Narration also communicates. But story, traditionally, is a text — and its “world” is contained. Communication is intersubjective — and involves the exchange, negotiation, and differences/agreements of and by subjects seeking to understand something together.

    4) Narration is disrupted by communicative media. Because the narrative frame is disembedded from the narrative performance. “Stories” are dislocated, fragmented, distributed — the speaker/teller and audience are each radically decomposed.

    5) The communicative and distributive aspects of social media then become quite interesting. As authority of the speaker/teller is undone by the loss of narrative frame and context, authority of participants/audience increases. “Story” segments are “voiced” authentically (more or less) by each communicating participant. Story is possessed/owned and performed by the “reader” whose tweets, posts, comments, etc now serve to “perform” and enact the new “narrative.”

    6) Narrative authority, once belonging to a combination of the myth/story and its speaker (traditional oral form) is inverted now and passes over into a strange mediated (so, distanced) “conversational” form. Story has become Talk.

    7) The challenge, then, is in demarcating and identifying narrative forms appropriate for the medium. That is, forms of Talk: telling, addressing, appealing, commanding, enchanting, charming, deceiving, critiquing, and so on.

    8) The form of talk and act of talking become difficult to distinguish. The “appeal” of the thing said and claimed becomes easily legitimated or justified by the “appeal” of the image of the speaker. “Truthiness” replaces the legitimate claims of authoritative speakers (having the authority to claim what they say). An impression of “influence” attributed by the medium (Klout) and earned through activity becomes inseparable from the meaning claims of the speaker: the authority of the influencer is his/her authoritative online activity.

    9) The distinction between an old, traditional form of oral story telling, and a newer, democratized and enlightened form of mediated discourse is now difficult to make out. The form of story telling — ritual if you will — and the stories told again conflate and for each narrating authority (storyteller, influencer) there is an audience invested in both accepting/believing and retelling/communicating the stories told. Narration, once central to traditional cultures, whose stories were their identity, is now multiplied: subcultures are circles in which the influence of influencers is circulated by means of talk.

    This is a view that rests on the close coupling of the meaning of narration and the form of its presentation and frame of performance. If course one just looks at the “content” of narration — what’s spoken — then the form as medium and the performance as social context are irrelevant.

    But given the long and “storied” tradition of advertising and marketing, I think it wise to account for the impact of the medium on the use of story. And that one recognize that social media are a form of conversation (Talk), and that for every published/posted phrase there is an “author/speaker” whose performance is often deeply invested in perceived and real relationships to audience, peers, colleagues, and friends. And that this is Talk as a social form, mediated and distributed “speech” but also mediated and reproduced social “relations.”

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