Interview with Leather Bag:
Recently I sat down with Nick’s Leather Bag to discuss life.
For this redesign task, I personified my leather bag and let it speak for itself. Rather than solely changing the medium through which I explored the bag I wanted to also shift the perspective of how the bag is being viewed.
In creating this task I needed to consider several things. Firstly, I needed to think about the conventions of an audio interview. This got me thinking about the literacy skills required to accomplish this: how to write interview questions, how an interviewer should deliver questions, what the progression of an interview tends to look like, how to use audio recording tools, what type of music is suitable for an audio podcast-style interview, etc. This shift in mode highlights, for me, many of the ideas presented in this module’s exploration of multiliteracies. Had I decided to create a video interview, this switch of medium would again require a shift in the literacy skills required.
What really stuck with me from this module was the notion that literacy is design. This task helped consolidate this for me as I saw how I designed this audio interview beyond just the words being spoken. As the New London Group (1996) discusses, my task caused me to consider several design elements, namely: linguistic design, audio design and multimodal design.
References:
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.
Hi Nick,
I thoroughly enjoyed this personification of your bag. The personality you’ve given your bag is quite entertaining, and I like how distinct its own self-perception was in contrast to how you defined it initially as simply ‘your bag’. Great writing and thoughtful responses for the interview as well- I took a look at your initial project and the comparison was interesting to dissect. The shift in mode here is quite clear; I think you did an excellent job shifting your thinking from the written and visual medium to an auditory one, complete with the other elements required to create a compelling podcast, such as music and pacing, versus the interview format of it all. I’ve recently begun listening to the Everything is Alive podcast, so the similarity brought me a lot of joy. Shifting the pitch of your ‘bag’ also added another layer to it. Overall, awesome job!
Hello Nick,
I wanted to comment on how much I love your design choices for this task; it never occurred to me to utilize personification as a method for generating a conversational piece rather than a simple explanatory or descriptive monologue which is the direction I went in for my own response. By switching modes, you were able to open up a whole new arena for how one would go about describing the contents of their bag, and I must say your reflection on generating and conducting interviews really brought a new light to this assignment for me. I want to ask you though; if the task was to re-do the “what’s in my bag” task in another written mode, would you have gone for the same conceptual design (as in, a transcript of an interview, or something similar), or do you think you would have gone for something else? Is there something specific about utilizing an audio medium that stood out to you, like how you mention pairing speech with music, that you think could be translated to a text-based medium?
Awesome and creative post! Love it!
Cheers,
Cody