My intervention was centered around the exploration of how products in the modern day are manufactured all across the world, and the process is very simple. In whatever room and with whatever amount of people, I ask the group of people to present however many items they have that are made in different countries, and I document the number of items. This intervention is vastly inspired by the class with the boxes, but I thought as to do something with what we carry everyday instead of asking people to specifically do something. I think this intervention is intriguing in that it calls on the participants to not just learn more about the global village, but to also think about specific memories they have with purchasing the item.
I attempted this intervention three times, once with myself, once with my roommates, and once in class. Alone, I documented 7 countries. With my roommates, I documented 10. Finally, in class we documented 17. The final result in class was vastly different than what I expected. As the change between myself and my 3 roommates only differed by three, I expected the class to have a number much closer to 10. I had this expectation knowing most of the world’s products are manufactured by a few selected countries such as China and Vietnam. However, the class presented a great number of items from countries I didn’t expect to be included, some of which I knew way to little about to spell out. This surprised me because I wouldn’t even know if some of my belongings are manufactured in these countries.
While I, an international student from Taiwan, expected my intervention to open the eyes of my participants to things they don’t think about in this global village, it seemed to have opened my own eyes more than I anticipated.