The things fiction gets right.

A fictional story can describe an event that never happened and a person who never existed, yet still make us recognize something familiar. We can see ourselves in characters we have never met and understand experiences we have never had. Fiction often gives us a way to think about things that are difficult to articulate directly.

Fiction is not reality, but it can still tell us something true about reality.

This is what I find interesting about storytelling. A writer can combine people, places, events, and emotions that may have never existed together. They can exaggerate certain details, leave others out, change the sequence of events, or create an entirely imaginary world. These changes do not necessarily make the story less truthful. Sometimes they make the underlying truth easier to see.

Fiction changes the facts in order to reveal something about the experience.

A fictional character can represent a person without being a portrait of a specific individual. An invented setting can communicate the qualities of a real place. An exaggerated situation can reveal something about an ordinary experience. A story can be entirely fabricated and still communicate something recognizable about memory, relationships, fear, belonging, loss, or joy.

In this way, fiction can sometimes feel closer to reality than realism does.

Realism is concerned with accurately representing what is there. Fiction is less constrained by that requirement. It can ask what something feels like rather than simply what it looks like. It can focus on the details that matter to an experience, even when those details are not literally accurate.

This distinction has shaped the way I think about representation more broadly. I am interested in the difference between showing something as it exists and communicating what it is like to experience it.

That question eventually became central to my work in architectural visualization.

Architectural visualization often prioritizes realism. Digital tools allow us to produce increasingly accurate representations of materials, lighting, scale, and spatial conditions. These images are useful for communicating what a building might look like when it is constructed.

But looking realistic does not necessarily mean communicating experience.

A rendering can accurately show a room without communicating why the room feels quiet. It can show the color and texture of a material without communicating how it changes the atmosphere of a space. It can depict a building from a technically accurate perspective without telling us how a person might actually move through it.

This is where I became interested in storytelling as a method for architectural visualization.

Rather than beginning with the question, “How can I make this space look real?” I became more interested in asking, “What experience am I trying to communicate?”

The answer might lead to a photorealistic rendering. It might also lead to an illustration, collage, diagram, abstract image, or imagined perspective. The appropriate medium depends on the idea.

In my MFA research, I explored this through character-driven perspectives, atmosphere, storytelling, and intentional choices of visualization medium. I was interested in how representation could communicate qualities of architecture that are difficult to measure but central to how we experience space.

A fictional perspective can be particularly useful for this.

Instead of showing a building from the most objective or technically useful viewpoint, we can imagine a person within it. What do they notice? Where do they go? What might they remember? What does the space feel like at a particular time of day? What details become important because of their particular experience?

These questions introduce fiction into architectural representation, but the purpose is not to invent a false version of the building. It is to create a perspective through which something about the real experience of the building can be understood.

This is why I do not see fiction and reality as opposites.

Fiction can create enough distance from reality to help us examine it. By changing circumstances and constructing imagined perspectives, we can make relationships and experiences more visible.

The same is true of design representation.

A representation does not have to reproduce a space exactly to communicate something meaningful about it. Sometimes an abstraction can communicate more than a photograph. Sometimes a diagram can explain a relationship more clearly than a rendering. Sometimes an imagined character can help us understand a real user's experience.

The goal is not to make representation less accurate. It is to reconsider what accuracy means.

Perhaps the most useful representation is not always the one that looks most like the thing itself. Perhaps it is the one that communicates something essential about the way that thing is experienced.

This is what continues to draw me to storytelling in design. Fiction gives us a way to construct perspectives, test ideas, and explore experiences without being limited to literal representation.

A story does not have to be true to help us understand something that is.

Sometimes, the things that never happened can help us see the things that do.