Category: stakeholder

intervention 4: explore with stakeholder about the impact of seating arrangements on communication

here is their seat arrangement in their family:

Laissez-faire type:

Pluralistic type:

Consensual type:

Protective type:

Reflection

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.

stakeholders: user + expert

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.

Intervention 2

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.

REFLECTION

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.

An interview with matchmaker

My project: How to handle the conflict on marriage and love views between two generations?

Taking on the feedback from tutors (David and Jasminka ), matchmaker is a key person that have power to talk with parents, so I started to interview with matchmaker that I could use as primary research to support my project.

Describe your job as a matchmaker. 

Agent A: It’s a very happy job because I develop very personal friendships with my clients. They are very open with their stories and share their own problems and life purposes. It takes a lot of skill to build trust in a short amount of time. I would like to think that we would be friends outside the matchmaking sphere.

Agent B: As a matchmaker, we work closely with our singles to learn more about their preferences. What kind of profile, physical and personality preferences do they have? This includes age, education level, religion, ethnicity, smoking and drinking habits, height and build. And personality preferences would include characteristics such as introverted vs. extroverted, spontaneous vs. organised, etc… We meet every one of our clients for face-to-face consultations and this matchmaker’s assessment is very important, because sometimes how clients perceive themselves may be different from how others perceive them. We also take the time to find out about our clients’ past relationships, passions, values and what is most important to them.

What types of people do you think use matchmaking agencies the most?

Agent A: My clients are usually professionals: bankers, lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs or executives. I would say the quality of the people in my agency is quite high.

Agent B: People who are busy. People who have no time to get a drink, people who live generally further from bars or restaurants, or people whose social circles are less defined. And parents also help their child to find their partner through matchmaking agencies.

Are there more available women that seek to find a partner or more available men? If so, why do you think there is a gender imbalance?

Agent A: One reason is that in the past, marriage is seen as a way to financial stability for women. However, with more and more ladies being highly educated and doing well in their careers, marriage is no longer about financial stability. They are looking for someone who is on the same level as them in terms of education level as well as income. There’s a phenomenon known as the “education squeeze”, coined by sociologists. Women tend to marry up and men tend to marry down. Hence, if you put 100 men and 100 women together and ask them to pair up, at the end of the day, the two groups left: the top 20 percent most educated women, and the bottom 20 percent least educated men. 

Is there a stigma against going to a matchmaker or to speed-dating events to find a partner? 

Agent A: When we first started 12 years ago, there used to be a stigma. But now, we are living in an era where people are used to outsourcing things. For instance, when we are going on a trip, we look for a travel agency; when we are looking for a job, we turn to a recruitment agency. So it’s the same with singles who are looking to find love. And as they see that our database has successful professionals just like you and me, they are more open to turning to dating agencies.

How involved are matchmakers?

Agent A: We are there for our clients every step of the way, from meeting them first to learning more about their profile and preferences, handpicking their matches, arranging the date, booking the date venue, reminding our clients before the date, and contacting them at the end of every date to get their feedback. Clients will also call us to ask for dating tips or advice and we will help them in any way we can.

Have you ever met someone who was forced by their parents to go on a blind date?

Agent A: Many young people are forced to date by real pressure and their parents at the beginning. Although they are forced to date, they also will call us for dating tips and advice on dating, and we will help them, which shows that they still attach great importance to the blind date. Although they are forced by parents, they really want to find their soul mate, but maybe they don’t agree with their parents’ behavior.

THE BOX OF UNCERTAINTIES

DATING CORNER

Introduction

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. 

( video link: https://youtu.be/OFtrvsqYCHY)

Who are my stakeholder?

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