Narrative by Design: Identity Mapping Studio

A spatial and reflective system for making meaning from lived experience

Creator & Lead Instructor | Career Design Lab at Dartmouth Center for Career Design

Case Study: Narrative by Design – Structured Identity Mapping for Reflection & Communication

Problem

Many students have diverse experiences but struggle to articulate coherence: their résumé feels like a list, not a story. They often can’t answer questions like “Why did I do these things?” or “What connects all these interests and actions?” This makes it difficult to communicate identity or intention credibly in portfolios, applications, or interviews.

Approach

I created an Identity Mapping Studio grounded in design cognition, narrative psychology, and reflective pedagogy. The method uses a five-phase structured process:

1. Fragmentation — break experience into discrete, movable units (memories, roles, achievements).

2. Categorization — sort units into interpretive lenses (values, strengths, interests, skills).

3. Pattern Discovery — visually cluster and reorganize items to reveal themes, contradictions, recurrent ideas.

4. Dialogue & Interpretation — through structured reflective conversation, interpret what these patterns might mean.

5. Narrative Construction — distill the insights into a coherent statement: first a paragraph, then a sentence, and finally a one-word essence that captures identity orientation.

This approach combines hands-on, material interaction (tiles, clustering) with cognitive offloading and reflective meaning-making, intended to lower cognitive load and encourage insight.

Prototype / Outcome

The studio produces identity maps, clustered tiles, thematic groupings, narrative statements, and distilled conceptual words. These artifacts give students visible, manipulable representations of their identity — making internal, fuzzy experience tangible and communicable.

Impact (as described/observed)

Students reportedly shift from “fragmented résumé” to “coherent identity.” They gain clearer understanding of their values, strengths, and underlying motivations. The process helps them articulate personal narratives more confidently — useful for portfolios, applications, interviews, or self-reflection. Through externalization and structured reflection, they emerge with a grounded sense of self that feels meaningful and communicable.

Why This Work Matters

Students often struggle to articulate who they are—not because they lack experience, but because they lack a framework for interpreting it. In advising sessions, they frequently express uncertainty:

Identity as a Representational System

Identity in this project is understood not as a fixed trait, but as a representational system—a set of experiences, values, strengths, and interests that gain coherence when they are made visible, rearranged, and interpreted. Instead of holding identity internally as a mixture of memories, achievements, and impressions, students externalize these elements into discrete, movable components.

When arranged spatially, these components form identity maps: visual artifacts that mediate reflection, reveal underlying patterns, surface contradictions, and support clearer communication. By shifting identity from something felt but unarticulated to something visible and structured, students are better able to understand their motivations, recognize recurring themes, and construct narratives grounded in clarity and self-awareness.

Process Overview

The Identity Mapping Studio follows a structured five-phase cycle designed to help students externalize experience, surface patterns, and articulate coherent identity narratives.

Phase 1: Fragmentation

Students deconstruct their résumé into small, movable pieces. This externalization shifts identity from something held internally to something visible and manipulable, reducing cognitive load and revealing details that often go unnoticed.

Phase 2: Categorization

Each piece is sorted into one of four interpretive lenses: Values, Strengths, Interests, and Skills.

This step exposes early identity blind spots.

One student observed:

“I realized there are almost no strengths here… everything is skills.”

Phase 3: Pattern Discovery

Students cluster and reorganize tiles to reveal themes, tensions, and through-lines that are not evident when experiences remain in linear résumé format. Visual grouping makes patterns intelligible and contradictions explicit.

Phase 4: Dialogue and Interpretation

Structured, reflective dialogue supports deeper meaning-making. Students explore why patterns matter, how specific experiences shaped them, and what motivations underpin their decisions. This interpretive step transforms arrangement into insight.

Phase 5: Narrative Construction

Students distill their identity narrative through a sequence of compression exercises—first a paragraph, then a single sentence, and finally one conceptual word that captures the essence of their emerging identity. This final articulation becomes the anchor for future storytelling in interviews, applications, and personal reflection.

Dialogue as a Designed Interaction

Dialogue in the Identity Mapping Studio is not incidental; it is deliberately designed as part of the system. Rather than casual conversation, students move through a sequence of reflective prompts that help them interpret what they see on the page or table:

What Students Do in the Studio

Students work with identity as something they can move, sort, and shape. The studio creates a hands-on environment where scattered experiences become visible and thinkable through material interaction. As they handle the pieces of their résumé, students slow down, notice patterns, and discover meaning that is hard to access through reflection alone.

In the studio, students engage by:

• Cutting their résumé into discrete, movable lines

• Color-coding experiences to indicate values, strengths, and themes

• Clustering related phrases into meaningful groups

• Reorganizing tiles to test different interpretations

• Writing short summaries to articulate insights

• Naming the conceptual identity that emerges

Emergent Themes from Identity Mapping

As students externalize, sort, and reorganize their experiences, shared identity patterns begin to surface. This thematic map visualizes the core themes that consistently emerged across multiple student sessions during the identity-mapping process.

Data Summary and Key Insights

Across more than thirty student sessions, students consistently reported a clearer understanding of their identity narratives after completing the mapping process. Using simple pre- and post-session check-ins on a 5-point scale, students rated their clarity about how their experiences fit together. On average, these self-ratings increased from 2.1 to 4.4, reflecting a noticeable shift from uncertainty to clarity.

In addition to these quick check-ins, students produced written reflections and identity maps that together generated more than 120 distinct insights. Reviewing these materials revealed recurring themes across participants, including mentoring, communication, creativity, problem-solving, value blind spots, and identity contradictions.

Taken together, the numbers and written reflections show that when students externalize their experiences and reorganize them visually, they tend to see clearer connections, articulate their motivations more confidently, and identify strengths they had not recognized before.

Before and After

Students often enter the studio unsure how their experiences connect. As one student reflected, “My résumé looks random. I don’t know how these things connect.”

After reorganizing their experiences visually and synthesizing insights, a coherent identity begins to emerge:

“I’m driven by mentoring, communication, and creative problem-solving. Everything I’ve done reflects that.”

Identity maps make this transformation visible—helping students understand not only what they’ve done, but why it matters.

Learning Outcomes

Students leave the Identity Mapping Studio with a clearer sense of who they are and how to communicate that identity with confidence. The process not only clarifies what matters most to them but also strengthens their ability to translate reflection into language they can use in interviews, applications, and academic or professional conversations. The outcomes reflect both internal insight and practical communication skills.

System-Level Implications

Identity mapping operates not only as a reflective practice but as a designed system with broader implications for how people understand themselves, how technology can support reflection, and how groups make meaning together. When identity is externalized into a visual structure, new possibilities emerge—both for individual insight and for the design of tools and environments that scaffold clarity, dialogue, and shared understanding.

Below, the accompanying visual highlights three system-level extensions of the work: how identity maps mediate reflection, how their structure suggests future sociotechnical applications, and how the method can scale to collective contexts.

Closing Reflection

Narrative by Design embodies my belief that clarity grows when people have the space, structure, and support to reflect on their lived experiences. By externalizing identity and engaging with it actively, students begin to see themselves more honestly and communicate their stories with confidence and intention.