rga interactive

"interactive designers aren't just telling one 30-second linear story—they're telling hundreds of interwoven stories as well as non-stories"

- from a story about R|GA on their website in comm arts magazine

This writer seems to have found another path to the understanding of a well-designed corporate identity as myriad paths starting from different perspectives, media, and expectations but converging on a central idea. I first saw this pattern in a video of Garett Lisi explaining quantum physics - he showed several different views of the way that fundamental particles can be clustered (i.e. by mass, color, flavor, spin, etc - I think), but he showed them with an animated transition to make it clear that the apparently different structures we saw through those several lenses are actually just one single structure.

I later learned that this idea is also the basis of the "levels of abstraction" metaphor (at least in some cases), and that a craftsperson generally needs significant mastery of the subject matter before s/he can present it this way.

For a good storyteller, it's fairly straightforward to see how to connect a thread (through a given medium) from an audience's starting point to the core idea (assuming one has a grasp on that core idea). But how can we tell when the core idea is big/strong/complete enough to hold together several such threads, versus simply that our mastery of storytelling is lacking?