Project #2: Introductory Interviews with Image and Text
In our First-Year Learning Community, you have already introduced yourself in class and on our site, and reflected on your first weeks of college. For our this project, imagine you are being interviewed for an online publication about first-year design students—you can imagine this will be a publication from COMD to be featured on an OpenLab site, or dream bigger and imagine that it’s a feature on the AIGA Eye on Design site, like the article by Emily Gosling, “Today’s Design Grads Are More Woke Than Ever—and It’s Looking Great,” about a recent design graduate or the interview, or Ksenya Samarskaya’s interview, “Nontsikelelo Mutiti on Interrogating the Euro-centric Design Canon.”
Choose or create an avatar to represent you on the OpenLab. You might need to reconsider your avatar choice if you’ve already selected and uploaded one. Write one or two paragraphs in which you describe the image well enough that your readers need not look at it to know what it looks like, call attention to specific details in the image, and explain how the image represents you, specifically the you you’re representing in the interview.
In your interview, you will identify and answer 5 questions, four of your choosing plus the question about your avatar: What is your avatar and how does it represent you? Be sure to write more than the 5 and choose from among your best answers to shape a profile of you as a first-year design student. There might be some repetition from one question to the next, but that should be minimal, and instead each question should provide different information about you, your experience, your vision for your future, your goals, your artistic sense, your place in the design world, the design world’s place in your life, etc. Refer to the list we brainstormed for the range of questions, and feel free to modify as needed to best answer the questions.
The project overall should be approximately 750-1200 words, with each answer being roughly 100-200 words with an introduction framing the interview approximately 150-200 words.
Throughout your project, you can include images to express yourself better—not only your avatar but also other images that express you as a design student, as a future design professional, etc. Use the publications from Eye on Design as a model, your visual library and other sources (be sure you’re allowed to use their work!) for images to include, and feel free to be creative!
Ultimately, the materials you develop here can become part of your OpenLab profile or your ePortfolio’s About Me page.
Requirements for this project:
- Add your work on our course site as comments or posts, according to instructions.
- When adding a post, use the category ENG Project #2, and add any tags that you find appropriate, indicating both substance and which part of the project your post corresponds to (draft, final, etc). For the final draft, use the tag Deliver.
- complete the related homework posts described on our Ways of Seeing site
- include your avatar image
- re-read your work carefully several times, making changes as needed based on your ideas and feedback from me or from your peers
- post your finished work, approximately 750-1200 words, to our site by Th 10/10 11:30am
- Be prepared to write a cover letter in class on Th 10/10.
