Lizzie Wa Design

To do this week:

• Ideation – come up with loads of game ideas
• Ideation – some possible outcome ideas 
• Mood Boards – on important themes i have uncovered 
• Think about report structure 
• Think about environmental impact of my outcome 

Moodboards

I decided to set out the main themes I have come across so far from my research, observations and conversation with an expert. I then created a moodboard for each of these ideas to try and start exploring how I would bring these ideas to life. 

Safe and Comfortable

Invitation to interact

Bringing people together

Enjoyment even if they don’t interact 

Survey

From my survey research I found that almost everyone I spoke to preferred to connect with people in real life rather than virtually or over the internet. That means that my outcome must be something physical that helps people to connect in person. 

Common ground or doing the same activity came up frequently as a way to help people feel more comfortable interacting with others. While feelings of worry or anxiety were frequent answers to things that put people off talking to strangers. 

Everyone noted positive emotions that came with playing (along with the occasional stressed board game player) 

From talking to people about connection and the pandemics affect on it, I got variations on this answer quite frequently:  “I feel more connected to my friends/family, but less connected to society as a whole” 

It seems that many of us have become more insular in our lives and come to rely more heavily on close friends and family.  

Playful finds 

I came across this website http://beciorpin.com/ for Illustrator Beci Orpin. The webpage tempts you to collect painted rocks hidden on the page and counts up how many you’ve located out of the 10 available. It becomes addictive as you near 10 and feel like you need to hunt around for the last few before you can leave the page. This is really successful at keeping you on her website for longer, increasing the chance you will look at more of her work. This way of keeping people somewhere and keeping them engaged is what I am hoping to translate into my project. 

Ideation

I noted down some key points that I have found to be important so far to work out how these link together with other ideas and how they can be realised in my outcome. 

The main things i want my project to achieve are:

• Enticing people to interact 
• Making them want to linger a while 
• Creating a space where they feel comfortable 
• Create an experience people can enjoy even if they don’t choose to interact with it
• Make it clear that adults are supposed to play with it

All potential game/play ideas so far:

• Picture consequences 
  • Could then be projected onto a wall 
• String to answer questions
  • Would you rather? Build common ground while also creating an art instillations and space to play within. 
• Giant letter stamps 
  • Need two people to use
• Word stamps – choose 3 words to add to create part of an artwork. 
  • Choose colour and positioning as well. 
• Idea of getting more play into your life book
• Frames around the city that help you to see the area in a more playful way
• Play prompts around the city – linked to space 
• Train windows as an interactive game against other commuters
• 2 player game to allow you into an office building
• Collaborative creating project  – lego, blocks, letters, shapes
• Blocks that move up and down dispensing on pressure on other blocks nearby 
• 1 min portraits of another person
• Obstacle course 
• Moveable letters/words -write or rewrite something 
• Adding words to create a citywide story
• Sitting behind a screen facing another- creating something together 
• The floor is lava game
• Spinner on the wall to tell you which game to play

Faces and masks 

Faces are important for connection. Smiles and eye contact. During the pandemic we have been wearing masks which has acted for many as a barrier to connection and make communication more difficult. It has really highlighted the important role that our faces play when it comes to connection and communication. 

This has made me think that maybe my outcome should focus on faces? Our voices are maybe not as important as our faces when it comes to making connections. You can connect without talking – faces say so much themselves. 

I decided to do some research into how our faces play a role in helping us to connect/ 

Eye contact

I explored the importance of eye contact and its link to feelings of connection. It turns out that eye contact makes us feel as if we are likely to be similar to the other person (Zhou et al. 2018), which in turn can create a feeling of common ground and connection. 

Making eye contact also prepares your brain to empathise with others (Koike et al. 2019), which is also vital to connection. 

Apparently it takes 3–5 seconds of eye contact to make a connection (Hereford 2017), which is actually longer than you think. Eye contact also releases oxytocin that makes us feel in love and connected with people. Eye contact is so vital to well-being, that we’re programmed to do it from birth. The distance a newborn baby can see is around 8-12 inches, the same distance from a mother’s breast to her eyes (Welch 2020).

This video shows an interesting experiment about what happens when you get people to make eye contact for longer than they usually would.

Smiling

Smiling is also another important part of connection. It is well known that smiling is contagious. It makes people feel better even if only subconsciously. Our instinct for facial mimicry allows us to empathise with and even experience other people’s feelings (Cell Press 2016). Smiling positively impacts social situations, makes us more likeable and is also a universal means of communication that is hard to misinterpret (Savitz 2011). 

If eye contact and smiling are so important to our wellbeing and our social interactions then it seems a perfect place to focus on. Faces and facial expressions transcend other separators such as language. A smile can be shared between people of any age, background, culture, language and it is still understood. Going back to Gillian Sandstrom’s ideas around causal connection, her starting point for years of investigation into causal connections came from a shared moment of eye contact and a smile from a stranger that made her feel noticed and as if she belonged (Sandstrom and Whillans 2020).  

Found Faces

I have been interested in found faces for years, always happy to find a face appearing on the front of a car or within the shape of a building. Recently I have started to document them more and more. I love how they are created totally by accident and you can only find them by looking at everyday spaces in a playful way. 

Games related to faces 

I started to think about some of the games that could be played related to faces. 

• Faces consequences? (forehead inc eyebrows – Eyes and nose – lips and chin) 
• Finding faces in nature- in architecture?
• Drawing other people’s faces?
• Using stamps to create faces? 
• Using objects to move and create your face? Someone else’s face? Any face. Then can photograph it and send it somewhere? Could be a few faces people can change and make with photos as the record before they get changed again. 
• Shapes that when stood at a certain spot they become a face? – this can be changed and played with but needs two people really as you cant see the face and change the face at the same time. 

Potential outcome ideas:

1)Making a face – Playscape/sculpture 

Shapes you can move to make a face

Stamps to make a face

Shapes that line up from a certain spot to become a face – can be changed but required two people as cant see the face from where you change it

2)Exhibition

3 activities, warming you up to interactions
Images of faces in nature/architecture

Something else 

Sit within 2 person screen and portrait drawing in pairs 

(should an exhibition be more about an experience than an activity?) 

3)Play within the ordinary 

Setting up viewfinders/frames that create faces in normal spaces. Adding eyes etc. Adding playful fun to everyday activities.

4)Book/Magazine/Website 

Containing ways to add play to ordinary life. Maybe focused on one geographical area. How can you initiate play in each space? (leaving the start of a game of noughts and crosses for someone else to add to etc.) 

A map of the city’s faces? How could this help connection grow?

5)Space

Creating a communal space where people can interact and engage in a range of playful activities. Possible a large table in the middle with various activities on and on walls. 

All of these outcomes would be colourful, fun and playful in design to tempt people in and spark a sense of play and fun even in those who don’t engage with it. 

Recap narrative and aim

I started to recap on the narrative and aim of my project to ensure it was fully developed and to help me focus my outcome. 

What is the problem and why should it be fixed?

The problem is that during the pandemic people were isolated from each other and much less connected with wider society. They stopped having casual interactions and connections with others and their pool of influences and experiences became small and limited. With face masks, fear and uncertainty, connections with wider groups became much harder. Now in the wake of the pandemic, we are still struggling to readjust back to normal life. And it has also given us a chance to consider what kind of life we want to go back to and question how we lived before. We were more connected with wider groups before the pandemic, but with the modern digital world of online connection, phones etc were we actually as connected with our surroundings and the community around us as we should be? 

We spend alot of our time surrounded by other people. While commuting to work, in the supermarket, living in blocks of flats etc. but so many people feel lonely or disconnected with the people who surround them. It’s so easy to keep your head down as you pass other people and avoid eye contact at all costs. But the benefits of fighting this urge, pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and engaging with others is massive. 

How lonely and disconnected are we as a society? Stats? What about other communities and societies around the world – are we particularly bad? 

Opening people up to wider pools of influence and experience is good at helping people empathise with others and understand situations outside their personal experience. It also boosts wellbeing in a variety of ways and helps us deal with situations our close friends and family have not encountered before. It creates a happier, more caring society and community, reduces feelings of loneliness and isolation and allows deeper and longer term connections the space to grow. 

What am I trying to do? What do I want people to do? Inspire or enable?

To help counteract this issue and get people to look away from their screens and towards other people, I want to create a situation that allows connection to grow and flourish. I want to enable connection to take place during everyday life and inspire people to bring this with them as they go about their days. 

I want to bring moments of joy to people. Happier people are more likely to spread this happiness and interact with others.

I want to reward people with joy when they look away from their phones, or the ground, or their friends’ faces to see the world around them and the other people who inhabit it alongside them. 

I want people to communicate with others they don’t know – verbally or non verbally. I want to create shared smiles, nods or even eye contact. I want to ground people in their existence in their space and alongside others. 

Encourage eye contact 

Encourage people to smile at each other 

Encourage people to talk to strangers 

Clear about connections 

Casual connections, connections that help make us feel part of our surroundings and give us a sense of place and belonging. People who come from all backgrounds and experiences, bringing different perspectives together. This can cover any kind of connection or communication, no matter how small. Anything that makes us feel connected to where we are and the people around us, not isolated in the presence of others. 

What activities feel playful – enjoyment and recreation 

• Dressing up
• Dancing
• jumping/ hopping
• Following lines/shapes on the floor
• Climbing on things
• Moving things around 
• Painting/drawing/creating 
• Moving your body 
• Out of your comfort zone?