Ellen Lupton, “Design is Storytelling”

Ellen Lupton describes that effective storytellers should bring personality and emotions to their experiences. Storytelling brings objects and characters to life. She emphasizes that we experience these products and artifacts as temporal rather than static, as stories unfold over time. The Jewish Life in Berlin project should bring figures and music spaces in Berlin’s music scene to life by creating interactions between people and places. My project should create connections between the material in my archive. By integrating social issues and placing materials within their historical context, the experience will create emotional connections with the material.

Carles Sora, talk on Digital Storytelling

Carles Sora discusses the procedural, participatory, spatial, encyclopedic, and atemporal aspects of digital narratives. One of the principles of digital storytelling that Sora highlights is the use of spatial metaphors to visually represent data. The Soldier Brother archive uses objects as a metaphor of representation for connections between the material. Just as how they use the metaphor of objects to go through the material, I can use the metaphor of different music spaces or musical instruments to go through the archive. The cabaret setting provides a metaphor of representing connections in the music network.

Sora also talks about different discourse layers, and the importance of having transitions and connections between the story layer and informational layer. I enjoyed the experience and visual transitions of the Monet2010 archive. While the user is on the journey of traversing Monet’s career, an option is provided to “See the pictures you have viewed”. My project concept can similarly include something like “See the music you have heard” that allows the user to browse the metadata of the music that they have listened to so far.