Teaching the design of narrative visualization for financial literacy

The authors provide a scholarly definition for metaphor-rich, story-driven ‘narrative visualization’. They argue that metaphors create a rich and emotionally resonant set of associations that frame the narrative and effectively support ‘System 1’ (or intuition-based) thinking and decision-making that Daniel Kahneman and others have identified as the primary drivers of financial behaviour. The authors then apply these observations to a case study in which they analyse student work on a financial literacy design project. They discuss best practices for teaching narrative visualization and argue for its relevance in a contemporary design education – especially its capacity to represent and reflectively explore complex financial and other concepts.