Dispatch #7

If you were online last week, you probably saw the viral video of a group of “kidnapped” dogs who banded together and jumped off a moving vehicle and walked ten miles home together led by a Corgi. There was also a wounded German Shepherd the others were protecting.

I spent a lot of time with this video. It was cute in a moment where most news is bleak. It was also fake. The footage was real, but the story was bogus. IRL, the dogs lived in a Chinese village and the German Shepherd was in heat, which is why the others circled it.

This story was a great example of how a simple story paired with imagery can carry an emotional narrative. It’s interesting to me, too, that this fairly low-stakes misinformation example was not AI-generated. It was just people filling in the blanks and repurposing existing content. Pairing imgs and text to share a story really is the center of most editorial projects.

In class, we've been working on a project the last couple weeks that requires students to craft a narrative in an unexpected format. The project is called RIP ZIP File and requires students to pick a subject from The NYT obituaries and create a short vignette about them told through a curated folder. It needs to include a .txt file (a README, if you will) and at the very least, three images (though videos, music files, and additional images were allowed). Through going through the folder, we should understand a little about the person and why the student chose them.

This project sits within our “curation” unit. I chose the zip file format for two reasons: it requires students to develop a strategy for how the files interact with one another in a lo-fi way, and two, it creates a specific viewing experience. It’s really fun opening up a zip file and seeing a publication inside! It’s intimate but also performative, and reinforces technical literacy, too.

At first, many students got stuck. Because they come in with writing experience, they often feel like they “aren’t designers.” But the real issue wasn’t a lack of design sensibility, it was a lack of decision. Many defaulted to rewriting the obituary. They had topics, not stories.

As the projects developed, that shifted. Once students realized they could direct the narrative, the work became exciting.

One student focused on clarinetist Ken Peplowski and translated musical notes into colored squares. She saved those out as a key (A FLAT.png etc.) and then filmed herself playing a song he often performed while the colors activated across the screen. Everything in her folder was energetic, noisy, and celebratory, and fitting to her impression of the subject.

It was interesting because once they moved away from the idea of what a design sensibility is, they just made content that had a specific job, which helped them be creative and experimental. Landing on a story first can help design have more emotional weight, and makes it memorable.