Towards Project 3

• April 12: Draft due to wiki by class time.
• April 21: Project uploaded by 6pm
• Don’t feel everything needs to be summed up, instead arrive at a sense of the topic from out of the details.
• Make use of micro-narrative (Project 1) and image narrative (Project 2).
• Remember, this project must be based on research. This might include historical texts, brochures, maps, interviews, images…
• The topic is at the intersection of your experience and the community’s.
• Wabi sabi is not about change and progress but about understanding how things are in the world. For your projects, you aren’t attempting a proposal or solution but an exploration and understanding, one arrived at through a total sense of the situation.
• The point is not to create an “essay” on the web.

Come up with general principles/rules of wabi-sabi as applied to multimedia writing. These form the theory of your project.

Identify the problem/conflict:

• Where did it come from? Where is it going?
• Who is involved?

Come up with the aesthetic of your individual topic, by analogy to wabi-sabi. What is the mood, ambiance, atmosphere of your topic?

• Given the framework of wabi sabi, think in terms of images and patterns. What phrases, key words, descriptors are associated with your topic?
• What are the images, metaphors, figures that are associated with the topic (community, problem/conflict)?
• What are the patterns and processes associated with the topic?

Create/discover a metapicture representing the picture theory of your topic

or

Create/discover a logo representing the visual identity of your topic.

• Note: by “create/discover” I mean that you will want to make use of existing visual materials (discover) but also edit and re-shape them (create).

Situate yourself in relation to the topic. This isn't simply telling your experience of the topic but also showing your relation to it in ways that situate you in the project. Think of analogies: [x] in your experience = [y] in the community problem/conflict. Work from the analogies to a general sense of the topic.

Develop a template or mapping of the topic, based on the above.

Next step: how to translate this into a web site design? Make use of chunking/diagrams/other information architecture concepts from earlier in the course to lay out large view of the site and use storyboarding to sketch out individual pages. Remember: there should be a clear and nameable relation/transition between pages (McCloud).

Site inventory:

• What files are in the site?
• What is the site structure?
• What is on each page?
• How is the material organized and navigated?

Sketch out what the site might look like.