Are we all storytellers? If you ask influential graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, he would say, “NO.” In a video created for the FITC Toronto Conference in 2014, Sagmeister bluntly expresses his criticism that everyone – including roller coaster designers – are not storytellers. If they are, they tell short, boring stories. For Sagmeister, the storytellers are those creating feature films and writing novels – FULL STOP. Is he right? Should web developers, video game creators, marketing professionals, and graphic designers stop calling themselves storytellers and instead focus on their technical craft, leaving the storytelling to movie directors and novelists?

I sincerely hope not. Unlike Sagmeister, I believe that the small stories we imbed into our everyday products, services, and media are what transform our ordinary world into a place of intrigue and wonder. The small stories are not, as Sagmeister says, boring. They are what makes the mundane extraordinary.

The Bachelor of Media Production and Design (BMPD) program believes strongly that all humans are storytellers. The program is designed to expose students to new digital technologies and ways of understanding communication. Students learn multiple programming languages, visual communication techniques, immersive media creation, data storytelling tools, augmented and virtual reality, and other modes of capturing and creating content for fact-based storytelling. They also learn the theories and ethics behind storytelling with courses focusing on how our ability to communicate can be used to help increase public knowledge and civic engagement. These skills are NOT taught so students can incorporate storytelling when they use them –  rather, they are taught so students can use them FOR storytelling. The tools for storytelling have expanded, and the BMPD students can use new and immerging digital technologies to share incredible stories. BMPD students are storytellers with a growing toolset for communicating their stories.

The BMPD Storytellers project is created to celebrate the new forms of storytelling. The Storytellers are given freedom to share a series of stories that focus on their new digital technologies and media production skills. The stories and technology the storytellers use are up to their discretion, with the sole limitation that they express core values taught in the program. The intention will be to have new storytellers each year, expanding on the growing library of digital storytelling projects created by the BMPD Storytellers.

For the project launch, I am excited to have three storytellers join the BMPD Storyteller team. Each storyteller will release a series of digital stories throughout the year, each with a different interpretation of what it means to be a BMPD Storyteller. Max Peacock will provide an interview podcast series called “Our Connected Future” where he shares conversations with different professionals and academics on how digital technology is affecting their field. Jada Rodgers will be exploring the reality-virtuality continuum by expressing the repeated narrative of a “day-in-the-life of a BMPD student” in a progression of more virtual immersive mediums. Lastly, Xinpeng Liu joins the BMPD storytelling team to first design the website and method for sharing the BMPD Storyteller project and to later create an exploration in the growing toolset of BMPD through an interactive timeline.

So, I ask once more – are we all storytellers? My answer is yes – it’s just a matter of using the right tools to express our unique stories. The BMPD Storyteller project intends to show how powerful different storytelling tools are.

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