PORTFOLIO AND STORYTELLING

For two weeks now, 9th semester Information Architecture students and I have worked on their portfolio information structure: What do potential audiences want to read, and how to structure content so that readers get the desired picture at a glance + get curious for more? We have tried to get the idea of relationship under the skin: It is not the content, it is not the readers or their context of reading per se, but the relationship in between, which generates interest. One solution, yet to be tried out, it that of storytelling: Storytelling has an information structure which already Aristotle put on form, and which more recently Ricoeur has elaborated: Mimesis. My suggestion is to try out building portfolio writing on the mimesis information structure. Like yesterday, we worked with Schutz's essay 'the stranger' and how, when being on the border between two cultures, you have to get conscious about your most basic assumptions, and then open yourself to negotiation. I suggest to make this a point in the IA students' method portfolio, by describing a personal experience of estranging yourself. The thing is: it is hard work, because you can not maintain the so convenient detached on-looker position, which Schutz so vividly describes, and which we as academics so enjoy.