What Is Integrated Storytelling?

Integrated Storytelling is the basis for audience-centric story experiences that apply, combine, and transcend disciplines and technologies to build and grow through every encounter with anyone who engages with them. Used as a design method, Integrated Storytelling creates a synergy between the story and the experience, while empowering the audience with new roles and ways to immerse themselves in engaging memorable moments. For storytellers, designers and brands, the principles unlock new ways of bringing their stories to life. For anyone who enters the story experiences they create, Integrated Storytelling opens the door to new, exciting adventures that leave them with lasting memories.

Integrated Storytelling is the core methodology applied at AdventureLAB, the integrated storytelling and experience design studio, located in Aarhus in Denmark. Klaus Sommer Paulsen, who is the founder of AdventureLAB has developed and worked with this discipline for many years.

At AdventureLAB, we don’t just write stories, we design them. We acknowledge the importance of adapting them to new media and technology. Modern technological achievements are not making storytelling redundant; rather, they represent opportunities to explore and experience stories in new ways.

We also train companies and creators around the world to apply this discipline in their own way of working with storytelling and experience design. We have developed and facilitated masterclasses, workshops and courses. From September 2020, Klaus teaches Integrated Storytelling as a part of an MBA Program at the University of Tartu Pärnu College.

Klaus also teaches the Integrated Storytelling Online Course designed for creative professionals in themed entertainment, leisure, branding, museums and cultural heritage.

In July 2021, Klaus published his book “Integrated Storytelling by Design: Concepts, Principles, and Methods for New Narrative Dimensions” with Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.