Week 1 – Thinking Through Narrative
Beginning to understand design not as the telling of a project’s story, but as the crafting of a landscape that allows stories, ecologies and experiences to unfold on their own.
Learning that a project should speak rather than be spoken for.
The core lesson of this week was captured in a single phrase that shaped the entire session: Do not tell a story about your project. Tell a story through your project. This simple distinction reframed how I think about representation and design. Rather than relying on written explanation to justify ideas, the emphasis was placed on using maps, data, photographs, imagery, video, timelines and biographies to allow the ecological background and the proposal to communicate themselves. Narrative was positioned not as decoration added at the end, but as a structuring principle that guides how a landscape is conceived from the start.
Recognising ecological narrative design as a way of organising experience.
We explored the idea of ecological narrative design, defined as the crafting of environments that tell ecological stories and guide visitors through sequences of spaces and events. This approach was presented as moving beyond pure function or aesthetics, weaving deeper layers of meaning into the landscape. The Thames was used as an example, not merely a scenic corridor but a living river system, a cultural archive and a climate-sensitive infrastructure. Narrative thinking allows designers to respond simultaneously to environmental realities and to the need for meaningful, legible public space.
Several key principles were discussed:
Sequential Experience – Landscapes can unfold like stories, leading visitors from open beginnings to intimate moments and finally to climactic views. Projects such as the Barangaroo South Public Realm illustrated how carefully structured movement can create a sense of progression.
Thematic Elements – Materials, planting, textures and ecological interventions can reinforce particular stories. Examples such as BIG HQ Terraces and Sundkaj Park showed how design can activate constrained riverfronts while still expressing ecological themes.
Cultural and Historical Ecological Context – Narrative can emerge from local histories, traditions and environmental memories. Projects like Jubileumsparken demonstrated how play, learning and ecology can be intertwined to honour both people and place.
Emotional Connection – Spaces such as Hatsinanpuisto illustrated how sound, scent and materiality can be used to evoke reflection and calm, creating landscapes that resonate emotionally as well as functionally.
Land as a Medium for Story – Some projects allow the inherent qualities of topography, water and vegetation to tell their own story, as seen in the Landscape Therapeutic Park in Brilon.
Interactive Participation – Narrative can be open-ended, inviting users to contribute through changing installations, community activities or playful interventions.
Landscape as a Living Story – Because landscapes change through seasons and growth cycles, narrative must be understood as dynamic rather than fixed.
This range of examples expanded my understanding of narrative as something spatial, temporal and ecological rather than purely textual.
Translating narrative thinking into my own project concerns.
In the latter part of the session, I began applying these ideas to my own site by identifying key problems and potential responses. I mapped the primary issues I wanted to address, such as ecological fragmentation, poor movement networks, congestion and a lack of informal play spaces. From this, I sketched initial relationships between problems and solutions: converting excessive hard infrastructure into greenspace, reducing pollution through better management and access, separating conflicting user routes, and creating areas for unprescribed, flexible play.
We discussed how narrative elements like space and movement, symbolism and metaphor, texture and materiality, and lighting and sound could be used to shape these solutions. This helped me see that technical and ecological strategies are not separate from narrative, they are the means through which narrative is experienced.
Reflection
This first week of the Resolution module fundamentally shifted how I think about design communication. Rather than trying to explain my project more clearly, I need to design it more clearly, allowing drawings, sequences and ecological logic to carry the narrative. The session reminded me that landscapes are not static compositions but evolving stories, and that my role as a designer is to create the conditions for those stories to be lived rather than simply described.