Jarret Fuller, designer and teacher, writes on his blog:
I was inspired by my conversation with Sam Jacob and adapted a framework he’s used in the writing classes he’s taught. For the first half of the class, the students had to bring in a single object, that cost no more than $30, to write about. Each week, they wrote about their object through a different lens: aesthetic/formal qualities, historical and contextual, and finally ideological. We weren’t too interested in voice yet, just how to talk about these objects and what they can tell us about design, culture, economics, etc. In the second half of the class, we used what we learned and added a variety of writing tricks to them: thinking about voice and tone, how can we play with structure, tell a new story. Throughout the semester, I was continually impressed with what the students brought — they took these objects they didn’t think they could write about and suddenly we were talking about immigration, class, identity, race, sustainability… It was so fun.