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Human Story Experience Design

“Human Story Experience Design” is a very constructed word, I admit. What it contains are reminders because words are often reminders.

Side note: When you write a word you remind yourself that you know the word. When you speak a word out loud, you remind yourself that it is part of vocabulary. This can be surprising from time to time. That’s why expressing is so important, and over-thinking so dangerous because thinking too much can result in you thinking you don’t know about that although the practical application would perfectly show it.

Originally it derived from the more common notion of “User Experience Design”, a nowadays heavily misused term. I could have left as it was. “User Experience Design” is something people get.

Why I changed it

A user’s experience is as general as saying a life experience. Do you get an idea when you hear it? Do you get excited? When you read “story experience” something happens. A story can be a lot — an adventure, a flat chat, a flight, reading a book. A user is that anonymous concept that makes me vomit when I listen to it or (occasionally say it) — it’s ugly.

A story is exciting. A user is boring. A story create curiosity. A user is flat white wall. A story is alive. A user only conceptually exists.

Also, I added “Human” to the term. This is the biggest reminder of what the design work I’m doing is all about because I could have left it as “story experience” or “story experience design”, and it would be more than appropriate. I didn’t because the majority of experiences visual and interaction designer create are for humans. If you look at some visuals, interfaces and interactions you wouldn’t believe someone (the creator) actually had intentions to make is usable or even a joy of use. That’s why the “human” element in the term I coined and in general is so important.

A first definition

Human Story Experience Design is a designed, well-constructed, solid and consistent experience in which a story is communicated through one to various media having in mind that it’s human persons who are interacting with it.

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Free Code Camp is the model I’m applying for writing. Here is why.

Since writing is my personal passion and motivating people to become their best self is a personal-professional field I have always been willing to play out, I was looking for and testing different ways to combine those two things.

After some months of usage and non-usage, I found what Quincy offers with Free Code Camp to be extraordinary. Therefore, I’m applying what he offers for people who want to write, not code, everything else that is not source code.

I do it for three reasons:

  • Personally, I want to write and motivate myself to write (the writer inside me)
  • Personally-professionally, I want to motivate people if they are interested in becoming better than they are right now (the coach and psychologist inside me)
  • There’s no such thing the way I have it mind — in which the model of Free Code Camp is just the start. I want to extend the learning-community space with tools, interviews and stories. (the conqueror with big plans inside me)

So, the Coastery Community starts like Free Code Camp but I have definite plans to make it more unique in its later iterations.

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3 Tips To Write Drunk But Not Get Drunk

The popular saying of “Write drunk, edit sober” refers to literally being and getting drunk to be liberated in your thoughts. Since I don’t enjoy the idea of becoming an alcoholic because I want to write a lot, here’s how to write in states in which you seem to be drunk but are actually not — at least not through alcohol.

Tip 1: Wake up earlier than you usually do

If you normally wake up at 5am, wake up at 3am. This way you don’t fully realize that you’re awake which is reflected on your writing as well. It keeps your rational mind or inner censorship shut and lets you write freely.

In a recent conversation in Guatemala a friends told me that another friend who is a writer applies that technique very well. If waking up early is hard for you, I can imagine it is, try approaching your goal time, e.g. 3am, step by step. The morning you start you wake up at 6am, the next morning 5.30am, and so on. It’s ok if it takes a week or two to reach the goal time.

Tip 2: Laughter with friends

Honestly, it’s been quite some years that I had deep laughter with friends that made me feel drunk. I remember I must have been 16 or 17 years old (I’m 32 now) when I watched a Stargate on German television with a friend — it’s when Macgyver (Richard Dean Anderson) was in the show. We were watching, commenting, analyzing on what we saw, pretty much like nerds. Although I never felt like a Sci-Fi nerd, maybe I was. My friend was for sure.

This relaxed state of being surrounded by the “Flimmerkiste” (old-fashioned German word to say “TV set”) providing us with content while we can go ahead and find all the weird, sometimes illogical things the TV presents us with and laugh about them strongly — so strong that my lower jaw started hurting because it got stuck. Since Stargate was only the beginning of our television enjoyment we spent some good hours building a “golden” triangle of my friend, the TV set and me. The good old times, you could say. Yes. For sure.

Tip 3: Walk a very long time and distance in a row

In April 2014, when I ended my trip through South East Asia, I spent some days in Singapore to discover what I today know as a very European-ized city-state in the heart of Asia. I lived in a friend’s big shared house I met through another friend in the Philippines. The other day I walked 4.5 hours (about 17 kilometers) from this very central house to the direction of the small island of Pulau Ubin, at the border to Malaysia. I was curious about it since I love a lot little islands.

Walking means I start thinking. Walking is my vehicle to start reflecting. That’s why traveling plays such a big role in my life. Walking is so special because it includes exhaustion and revelation at the same. Walking some hours in a row in a good speed gets you into a very focused state of mind — you feel tired (exhausted) but don’t care too much about it. When your mind is like that — again relaxed like in tip 2 — it’s easier to have revelations or personal insights. These insights will help you in your writing because when you start walking with a writing block in the back of your head, the long walk will unblock you.

In my personal case, on that specific day (April 26, 2014), I wrote:

It translates to:

Sports, radio and the advertisement are the places where it’s more likely to find your place as a rebel and unconventional thinker and where you can live out that part of your personality.

If you enjoyed this post you may also enjoy learning how to write and help nonprofits and new startups that bootstrap. You may also join my exclusive Facebook group “Find your coast. Write in focus.” in which you learn overcoming the hurdle of starting to write and tackling the problem of everyday distraction.

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