Distortions
All of us wear masks. Different ones in different spaces to distort ourselves. We realized that our classmates too were facing the same issue, especially being in a new environment and around new people. What could we do to make sure the student onboarding process is actually enjoyable and leads to relationships beyond the classroom.
Through this project, we designed small activities that would let new students learn more about each other, build trust and comfort among peers.
TEAM: Francesca Veratelli, Xidan Tu, Ailin Lyu, Xinyue Li
“All of us wear masks. Different ones in different spaces to distort our identity.”
The initial brief of this project was to follow the theme of ‘Distortions’, to find a problem area and propose a solution. We began by defining what Distortion meant to us as individuals. Putting down the various meanings, inferences, and metaphors associated with the word was an interesting exercise especially since all of us came from different cultures and backgrounds. We then decided to focus on data collection about the perception of beauty and what it meant to 'put on a mask'.
The data collection process for this project was particularly tricky. The questions that we wanted to ask were very personal and invited the participants to be reflective. We started by observing people on social media (Instagram, Facebook, etc). We then decided to conduct verbal interviews with people in our class, but we did not come up with any important data that we could use.
After a lot of deliberation, we decided to use engagement tools and interviews together as our data collection methods.
With the engagement tool, we wanted to tackle the physical and emotional aspects of distortion while with the interviews we hoped to talk about the cultural aspects of the same issue.
The tool explored whether people feel the need to put on a mask in various environments. We provided people with masks that they could write on and then explain the reasons behind their choices. The physical part asked participants whether they would like to alter their physical shape in any way.
After a round of primary research, we synthesized all the qualitative data we got from the engagement tools and decided to focus on the masks people wore in the classroom. We followed up by conducting interviews and asking students what helps them create a sense of trust and comfort with the people around them
After consolidating the data we reived from the secondary interviews, we came up with How Might We statements and decided to design an in-person activity.
We created a comic to explain how it works.
