Failure and frustration are often discussed as if they're antithetical to the creative process. When a project idea or design fails, we often imagine throwing it in the trash, starting again, or regarding the process as a waste of time. But writers and designers have argued that the multimodal composition process is in fact punctuated by failure, and in failures we often find glimmers of good ideas, or a solid draft that we can revise and polish into a version that better fits our vision.
For instance, Ira Glass, an NPR radio host and writer, frames failure as a necessary part of learning to do creative work: "nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work...It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Drawing on the idea that failure and frustration are a central part of the creative process, not a personal shortcoming, your task for this multimodal experiment is to create something that fails. This prompt also draws on concepts from game design, include "follow the fun" and "fail fast, fail often." Both of these ideas are based on the fact that the primary obstacles to creation can often be getting started and fear of failure. Reframing game design in terms of a race to fail fast can instead embolden you to take risky moves, try out new skills, and forces you to stop waiting for the perfect time or skillset to start your creation. Before getting started on your own failure, watch this video for more on this concept:
Keep in mind that though the concepts of following the fun and failing fast come from game design, they can translate to other areas of multimodal design as well.
So for your own failure, consider how you could take risks before you're ready, try out an idea that might be doomed to fail, or create something that's broken in an interesting way. This is pretty open-ended, but I don't want to constrain your process too much by making a lot of suggestions. But imagine how you might create a game where the player gets stuck, a puzzle that's unsolveable, a story that doesn't make sense, or a website with terrible design. Consider how you can interrogate what you consider to be the principles of "good" multimodal design by creating something monstrous.
If you're looking for more inspiration to help you get started, check out Brandon Walsh's short piece on how frustration is central to the learning process, particularly in the realm of the digital humanities, or you could check out poet and writer Eve Ewing's discussion on reframing failure. Or for perhaps a less serious take, consider why we love videogame glitches. If you're not sure where to begin, start with something you've always considered but never tried, such as writing a song or drawing a portrait.
Along with your version of failure or frustration, add a short reflection, either in the form of a voice recording, short video (feel free not to edit out the ums and uhs, we're embracing failure here), or written text. In your reflection, explain how intentionally heading toward failure changed your multimodal process, and why you characterize the result as a failure.
Submit your failure and reflection through Moodle (or through email if the file type is too large or incompatible with Moodle) by Sunday, September 20 at 10pm.
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