this intervention is based on the intervention 5 ( seating arrangement on communication). in this intervention, I will first throw a question or point of view to the other person, let him think or study carefully, don’t worry about asking the answer, let him digest it in his mind first, and challenge his original concept. ( inspired by the book: The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe) . I used critical design as a method to designe a dining table that can reflect the status of the family, and invite people to write down five key word to describe how they feel after seeing the dining table.
1. Please use 3 keywords to describe how you feel after seeing this dining table.
A: family, friend, communication
B: party, interact, space
C: warm, sweet, family time
2. Please use 3 keywords to describe how you feel after seeing this dining table.
A: distance, contradiction, estrangement
B: misunderstanding, inconvenience, serious
C: lonely, distant, bad relationship
I also placed it downstairs in my house and invite people to write down the keyword， but only received very few responses.
reference:
What is Critical Design? Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions about the role products play in everyday life. Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo.
What is it for? To make us think. But also raising awareness, exposing assumptions, provoking action, sparking debate.
Affirmative design is problem solving, with design framed as a process that provides answers in the service of industry for how the world is.
Critical design, on the other side of the page, is characterized as problem finding, with design framed as a medium that asks questions in the service of society for how the world could be.
according to the last tutorial feedback, I am a little aware the older you are the wiser you are, the more respected to be given and there is always this barrier attached to it when it comes to communication.
so what can help me to tackle this issue? could be a game? in the game, give them the role, the game is to play that role of being someone else, and see how they act and how they interact and how they feel.
so I invited one of the stakeholder to play the game with her family, and then interview her feelings, Does the game really help communication? Can it overcome the barriers of power?
interview:
stakeholder feeling: Playing games can indeed strengthen the relationship between family member and make you temporarily forget about power and status. However, one thing is not good. When playing games, most of your energy is on the game, and you forget to communicate.
From the previous research, it was found that Protective type and Laissez-faire type lacked communication, and during the discussion, I found that in these two type family, there is usually a seating arrangement at the dining table. Their seats are arranged according to the family seat, but this is unconscious
In the other two types：Consensual and Pluralistic, they rarely have fixed seats, and they do not arrange seats according to family status. They communicate more with their family members, less conflicts, and have a good relationship with family members.
So I think the seat arrangement and family status and rights hinder the communication between children and parents to some extent, and Communication will be affected by power. If I want to promote communication between different generations, I must first make them aware of this problem. So how can we make people aware of this problem? This will be my next intervention
Next step and ideas:
My previous interventions focused on how to reduce the conflict between different generations, but I found that communication is a long-term process，this problem cannot be changed in the short term. And I also found that if two people disagree, you can hardly expect a decent response from the other person. Normally, he will defend himself and try to lead your thinking and judgments astray. A few months later, when the old words are brought up again, you will find that no one has changed their minds, as if the previous argument has never happened.
So in the next intervention, I will first throw a question or point of view to the other person, let him think or study carefully, don’t worry about asking the answer, let him digest it in his mind first, and challenge his original concept. ( inspired by the book: The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe)
I will design a dining table. This is not an ordinary dining table, but a dining table that can reflect the status of the family. I will place it downstairs in my house or in the park, so that people passing by can think about the meaning of the dining table, and interview their feelings. I will make the next intervention based on the feedback I get.
Over the past few weeks I have been actively trying to develop a network of who have difficult to communicate with their parents to engage in my project. So far, four users and one expert have participated in my project. They will discuss with me the communication mode in their own home and the future family communication mode.
User: These four users come from different family communication patterns：protective, consensual, laissez faire and pluralistic.
expert: This expert comes from the rca service design profession. Junyi Cao is a creative and energetic service designer with the background in product design. She has been exploring the relationship between people and studying how to deal with the relationship between people delicately, so that this relationship is at a balance point. In her past project, Junyi and her team members have insights into the weakness of online participants in the actual hybrid conference, and tried to reduce this sense of difference, so as to achieve the effect of improving the efficiency of the conference.(about her project: When we talk and meet people face to face, we get most of the information about what they are thinking from body language and facial expressions. In a virtual environment, we get much less information, and we need more times to confirm the other’s attitude. Because there is less interaction, remote participants feel lonely and alienated, and they will be easier distracted than offline. We believe that increasing the viscosity of the meeting will help solve the above problems.)
I think she can give me useful feedback and opinions in my project in the future.
For my intervention, I invited one of my friends, she forced to blind date by her family, so far she attended fifth blind date, and I invited her to draw her life map related to her blind date, and choose a dating story into visual story(video), and then this video will be shared her parents, and her parents will create an ending for this story and share their feeling after watching this video. I also will share this video to other young and old generations to get more feedback.
PROCESS
FEEDBACK ONE:
FEEDBACK TWO:
FEEDBACK THREE:
FEEDBACK FOUR
REFLECTION
During the intervention, I found that it is difficult to engage parents to my project, specially some parents who force their child into marriage, they don’t want to share more opinion, so I think I should change my stakeholder and think about my backup plan, but I have no idea so far. I feel like this intervention is not very successful, because I hadn’t see any change from the parents, after the girl’s parents seeing the visual story, they still keep the old thought. From feedback I got, we can see that there are big different concept between young generation and old generation, and traditional concept is still spread among the boys.
To gain a industry knowledge of drama therapy online, I reached out to experts, Monique. She is a drama therapist and do a lot of stuff on drama therapy online.
Beneficial feedback I got started that: masks and costumes as a technique in the digital space, mask work is a staple of drama therapy work. As Jennings states, “some feelings can only be expressed through masks-feelings that are too anti-social, dangerous or depressing to be shown in other ways. Masks can contain the feelings that could not otherwise be expressed” (1990, ch.6, para.33). It is my belief that the online drama therapy space presents us with unique opportunities to not only work with masks, but to allow the client to see themselves in role with an immediacy that does not often happen in-person.
For my intervention 2, I will use mask as a technique, drawing their mood on the mask and invite people wear their mask to communicate with other people, but can’t speak, only rely on body language, this will last for 5 days, 10 mins a day. Finally, observe whether they rely on the face to have better communication.
One of the most prevalent technologies used in psychotherapy intervention is Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Both technologies are used as a tool to help guide psychotherapy treatments in patients who can benefit from interactive digital experiences. Below are two notable projects or organizations that are utilizing VR to enhance the patient’s traditional mode of psychotherapeutic experience.
MyPsySpace is a project by Missouri State University’s Second Life (SL) Prototyping Center for Psychotherapy Technologies that explores SL as a prototyping tool for HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) to offer “virtual translations of traditional expressive therapies (e.g. virtual sandplay, virtual drama therapy, digital expressive therapy, and virtual safe spaces).” The VR element is used to increase accessibility and flexibility to those who may not have the practical means to receive proper expressive therapies. MyPsySpace is designed to securely connect the therapist to a group or an individual patients located anywhere in the world. Moreover, one can virtually create any type of imaginable scenarios, images, or enact behaviors safely in the virtual space.
All therapists recognize the power of storytelling. In essence, our clients come to tell their stories and we need to know their full story in and out including characters, background, plots (and subplots), point of view, etc. With children, their personal stories often come out in fantastical and metaphoric ways and an expressive therapist has the skills to bring those out and enact change, if needed. Below are multimedia apps that can provide engagement as well as therapeutic, communicative, and expressive opportunities for a child client:
Plotagon: This is a creative animation app that is very easy to use. I have a 8-year-old who learned how to make a full 5 minute story in 10 minutes.
Puppet Pals 2: This is a essentially digital puppetry and you can even use your own picture to create a character.
Comic Book: This is a bit challenging to use for those who are not comic book creators. But, if you have a kid who likes to create comic books, this app has many layout options, caption tools, and stickers in its library.
Storehouse: Helps you easily create, edit and share visual stories. Perfect for teenagers who want to use their own digital photos without much text to tell a story that is meaningful to them.
These apps help create a multimedia story rich with complementary combination of text, still image, audio, and/or video that can be interactive and edited at any time. I encourage art therapists to try experiencing these apps for themselves to see if they can be a valuable tool in empowering the developing stories of our children and teenagers.
RESEARCH QUESTION: How can bring understanding in views of marriage and love between different generations?
For this project, I found that there was a need for a way of communicating which allowed for a greater breadth of expression than could be conveyed through text and talk with each other face to face. In my journey to find suitable creative interventions, I drew inspiration from the approach I had developed as psychology, and based on the feedback I got from the stakeholder, I applied my drama therapy training to the field of digital media. I plan to use performance narratives, through interactive creation, actively explore the combination of drama therapy and digital media, and provide a way to express their feelings , communicate with each other and interact with others.
I had designed the framework of the technique to follow a trajectory that began with telling existing stories and ended with creating new stories.
FIRST STEP:
Recounting a story which collected from the people who has a problem on marriage and love (about blind date or marriage) Since some people unwilling to share their experience at the beginning, I collected some story in real life as a material that participant can use. If they want to share their experience, they can create a life map which illustrates important moments or events; the maps are then embellished with stories that were important in each of these stages of life.
SECOND STEP:
Reading the beginning of a story and creating one’s own ending
THIRD STEP:
Creating a new story The multiple platform would create a space in which participants work collaboratively to create their culture and have a sense of ownership of the outcome.
FOURTH STEP:
Share your visual story and your parents can edit it
SCHEDULE:
Consulting with experts (05/21 — 06/21) The next step for my project is it consult with experts as my project tackles themes of how to applied drama therapy to the digital techniques.
art therapists;
artists;
video game designers
Collect real story can be as a material in the step one (04/21 — 05/21)
Further engage with stakeholder (05/21 — 07/21) How to engage people in my idea and have them easily understand each other. Build, edit and share their visual story
Do some research on Shaping Networked Theatre (05/21 — 06/21)
How can bring understanding in views of marriage and love between different generations?
WHY:
China is clearly one of the world’s favorite countries for forced marriages. According to the “Survey Report on the Status of Forced Marriage in China” more than 70% of the respondents had the experience of being forced into marriage by their parents. The reason foe this phenomenon comes from their lack of communication, different growth background and different channels for receiving information.
HOW:
In my journey to find suitable creative interventions, I drew inspiration from the approach I had developed as psychology.
I found that drama therapy is a method to help them understand each other more. Drama therapy offer new ways to express what you are thinking or feeling in order to cope with problems. Here’s an example: if you are having conflict with your parents, you maybe asked to role-play a scene in which you pretend to be your parents and speak from their perspective. It is intended to help participants break them out of any rigid roles or frameworks they have been limiting themselves to. They can express themselves while sharing a new side to their personality and learn to look at problems from the other side’s perspective.
How to engage people in my idea and have them easily understand each other is the biggest obstacle I need to overcome, and I got some feedback from stakeholder:
face to face therapy is a bit awkward;
It’s inconvenient offline, because don’t have much time to attend especially during pandemic;
They have not studied acting and drama
To further my stakeholder engagement I had conversation with psychologist, I have came up with multimedia platform that is to be used as part of my project’s targeted intervention, which can provide engagement as well as communicative, and expressive opportunities for different generations. The platform can help create a multimedia story rich with complementary combination of text, still image, audio, and/or video that can be interactive and edited at any time. These steps are as follows:
Recounting a story that the teller feels a strong connection to, usually from material that I collected in the real life;
reading online the beginning of a story and creating one’s own ending
Creating a new story with each other
WHAT IF
Parents and us are independent individuals, we can’t really change each other. My project aim to want to be understand each other better rather than proving that parents wrong in the views of marriage and love. After this project, they can understand each other more, and willing to communicate with each other, and accept the existence of different ideas. I am not against marriage, what I am against is the uniform criteria of happiness, like you have to get married at a certain age, if you don’t, you can’t be happy, you are a loser in life. I hope this project can reduce the conflict and young generations can have a say in the marriage.
based on the last feedback, I continue to develop my interactive video, and I collected some real example in the real life, because real people and real example are more convincing.
here is three example:
example 1:
name: yuhui huang age: 28 fashion designer she was forced by her parents to go on a blind date about five times, but she has not met a suitable person so far, and her parents said that she must marry this year, because they think 28 years old is old for women and the fortune teller said this year is her wedding year, and she is very troubled and does not know how to communicate with her parents. she think that It is impossible to meet the right person in this year, so she decided to move out instead living with her parents.
example 2:
name: waner chen age: 26 insurance She has a boyfriend, but her parents are dissatisfied with her boyfriend, because the fortune teller said that her boyfriend has many female friends, and he is likely to cheat after getting married, so her parents want her daughter to break up with her boyfriend . She is very entangled now. On the one hand, she likes her boyfriend, on the other hand, she doesn’t want to go against her parents’ meaning, and she is also a little superstitious in fortune telling.
example 3:
name: dasen age: 29 medicine He has a girlfriend, but his parents are not satisfied with his girlfriend because the fortune teller said that his girlfriend will bring bad luck to his family, but he insists on marrying his girlfriend. As a result, less than a month after the marriage, his father was diagnosed with leukemia and passed away two weeks later (his father was healthy and showed no signs of illness), and his father’s company also closed down.
and I also did some research on psychology, and I found that one therapy is drama therapy. Drama therapy takes a unique approach by using drama or theater techniques, including improvisation, role-playing and so on… Drama therapy combines drama and psychotherapy methods to offer new ways to express what you are thinking or feeling in order to cope more effectively with behavioral and emotional problems
It is intended to help participants explore their inner experience and break them out of any rigid roles or frameworks they have been limiting themselves to. They can express themselves while sharing a new side to their personality
drama therapy can also benefit participants by providing them with the opportunity to:
Express their feelings Tell their story Act out/work out issues and problems Achieve emotional and physical integration Experience catharsis Develop trust Work out relationship issues Strengthen or expand their personal life roles
Role-Playing
Role-playing allows the participant to alter their mindset, act out in new ways, and connect their own experiences to those of another person.
Here’s an example: if you’re having significant conflict with your parents, you may be asked to role-play a scene in which you pretend to be your parents and speak from their perspective.
I think it can help people explore their inner experience and break them out of any rigid roles or frameworks they have been limiting themselves to.
I think drama therapy can help young generation to communicate with their parents better, and learn to look at problems from the other side’s perspective.
NEXT STEP:
I will show these real example to people and get some feedback from them, What they think of these example?
I will combine these example with drama therapy. How to apply these real example to drama therapy? What techniques in drama therapy?
focusing on now is to find ways on how to investigate your question through interventions, so don’t think what will be in the end, don’t look right now at the final outcome
start with a smaller intervention to basically test with a target audience with these two generation, instead of producing the whole video to a high standard and making the actions
starting to only test the concept: write a script and write sort of like a skeleton outline of what would become the video to what would be in there what should be seen.
write the script for that scene, and then get people to read it, or someone to read it out, stakeholder or target audience, they listened back or they watch that sort of just a reading of it, and they give their ideas and input
just test those conceptual ideas with my participants as a stakeholder
psychological studies
mediator
social media would be quite an impact in that as well, how that brings conflict or war
The process of discovering ‘The Change I Want to See’ took a personal shift in Project Five, from dating corner to generation gap.
After did some research on generational conflict and techniques that mediator use, I think the best conflict solution is the way of communication. Adjusting their communication style is a method to reduce conflict. I think they need a mediator, someone they respect, maybe a close family, friend or relative or online platform. Come from a place of wanting to be understand each other better rather than proving that parent wrong.
The medium of communication is very important. There are two mediums that I think are feasible.
Matchmaker (face to face support interventions for reducing conflict) set up a counseling in the dating app or dating website.
online platform (digital interventions targeting parents and child relationships) watching the interactive movie with parents.
The goal of conflict resolution therapy is to help all parties involved feel as if they have achieved a “win-win” scenario, but it is difficult to do, because parents and children have cognitive biases, my challenge is to challenge traditional attitude, the position of this project is to help the person being in a position to get married, make the right decision and to not be forced into making the wrong decision. And I found that there are not many platform to deal with the generation conflict, most of the platform focus on couple relationship, so it is also very difficult to make study case.
In order to guide the focus of my research further, the following three aspect that I think I should consider in this project in the future.
understand what is the need behind the conflict between the two sides.(No one wants to conflict for the sake of conflict. The reason why the conflict cannot be resolved is probably because some of the needs of the conflicting party have been ignored, such as respect, love, and attention. If you want to stay entangled in conflicting content, these content may be longer than any Qiong Yao novel, and you may never find its central idea.)
Ensure a platform where both parties to the conflict are safe and can receive support.(Let both parties relax, feel comfortable, and get help from the process. Don’t let the process of conflict resolution turn into a trial meeting. No one is willing to spend a minute at a meeting that criticizes oneself.)
Let the conflicting parties use specific and executable language to express their needs and requests to the other party (You can’t make everyone think that “the women is the most beautiful” because everyone’s perceptions and standards are different, so if you say, “Bring me something good!”, someone might give you a cup of urine, because some people think that this is delicious! If you don’t want others to bring you a glass of urine, try to be specific. “Give me a glass of orange juice.”, “I think you can go home straight after get off work.”…
In relation to stakeholders, I initially identified 3 key stakeholder groups, the first being experts(dating agent) and the second being users(parents), the third being users(young generations). As my project has progressed, I have moved onto defining further to be government. Gaining stakeholder feedback is something I have struggled with on this project, I interviewed with the person who forced to blind date by her parents, and also interviewed with matchmaker who work in the dating corner, but received very little feedback. Consequently, stakeholder engagement is something I really need to extensively work on over the coming weeks.
After presenting my research for Project 5 – The Change I Want To See… in my tutorial, I have developed a series of next steps to take, as a result of analysing and reflecting on the feedback I received.
FEEDBACK
They are interested in people’s attitude for the difference in attitude. young people and parents whoever is a versatile narrative narrowed to their parents term of their view o love, what they think love is what, whether or not there is an overriding practical concern. Whether loving considered important at all, in regards to matchmaking, and it seems that the key person, or the key stakeholder or the key bridge in my project is the matchmaker, because they are the intermediary, that gets to speak to both parties. The two people who are being matched, it seems to me that my challenge is one to do with challenging traditional attitudes, there will be a group of people who may be value those more traditional more conservative, and then there will be those who freedom to choose for themselves, whatever path there is, but then I have this kind of societal barrier, and it’s gonna be interesting in terms of how to deal with unpacking.
They suggest that look at a specialism, that might help, and also explore counselling and the techniques that counsellors use mediation and the techniques that mediators use when dealing with conflict and dealing with different groups, Because I think from what you’re saying, the mediation element, or the Matchmaker is probably the most important person in all of this. I have the wishes of the of the LP, that want to get married on the other wishes parent, but the Matchmaker is key, because the method could be the person with the power to say to the parents, the thing is that whatever decisions the parents want to make, traditional, conservative values whatever is the people getting married that has consequences. So there is an argument that they are the most important people, because they have to live whatever decision is made. And if it’s the wrong decision, they are going to have to pay for it, emotionally, physically in terms of time and effort. So, it might be that my project is more about getting the parents and the older generation to understand the younger generation, maybe it’s more weighted in favour of the people who have to live with the decision.
This project has come from my focus I possibly should be helping married people or the person being in a position to get married, make the right decision and to not be forced into making the wrong decision. And the project is focused around that possibly understanding around that. Trying to get the people who are being pressured to understand the position that they already lived in, in terms of societal context that they’re in. Before to do something that will have a devastating impact on their lives, Potentially. I think I would possibly focus on the matchmaking element of it as possibly the ethical intermediary sort of decision making position as the person who speaks to both sides to help with that.
NEXT STEPS:
Further engage with stakeholders how to plan to get the parents, child, marriage choice, or objections, and how to get people to engage with the older generation their parents whose point of view?
Explore counselling and the techniques to deal with conflict
Focus on matchmaker and explore how to reduce the conflict through matchmaker?
Consider the position of my project as a researcher, where are my positioned in my project? In terms of the people getting married, the parents to view and the matchmaker, where do I see myself?
Today in china, many people find themselves too busy to pursue romantic relationships on their own. This is a very worrying trend for their parents, so in order to combat this, some parents have decided to write down their children’s information and romantic requirements on pieces of paper and bring these pieces of paper to parks located through out China, in order to form an off-line personalised match making service with other children’s parents.
China is clearly one of the world’s favorite countries for forced marriages. According to the “Survey Report on the Status of Forced Marriage in China” released in 2016, more than 70% of the respondents had the experience of being forced into marriage by their parents. The rate of forced marriage among young people aged 25 to 35 is as high as 86%, and even 3% of young people are forced to marry by their parents before they reach the legal marriage age.
Outline the Question
Intervention
• do the experiment
—attend the dating corner (the same person but different salaries) and communicate with parents who in the dating corner and look at how parents react to high or low salary.
In aiming to distinguish who the stakeholders involved in the change I am looking to make are, I split my stakeholders into 2 categories. The first being ‘Experts’ in the arena of matchmaking in the marriage market. The second category being ‘User’ this is looking at the young people who are qualified to enter marriage or are about to enter marriage and parents who force their children to marry.
Young people
Parents
Matchmaking practitioners : matchmaker / agent for dating corner / agent for dating apps / agent for dating TV show
