Project Description and Setup:
For my intervention, I left a prompt on a canvas in a public space, which allowed for people to interrupt their daily routine to draw whatever they would like.
- Find a public space to display a whiteboard or surface to draw on
- Write a prompt which invites people to draw or create whatever they please
- Return to the board in 24hrs to see what has been created
At first, my idea was to sit on the centennial common with a whiteboard and ask people to come and draw whatever they’d like to. This idea posed a few problems though. Firstly, I had discovered that allowing people to draw without others observing produced much more creative and interesting results than if there had been others around. Secondly, I do not own a whiteboard large enough to get peoples attention without asking them if they would like to participate. Since this is an intervention piece, I did not want to have as much of a role in the users’ experience as I would have had if I were to camp out on centennial. Therefore I modified my original idea so that I could use a larger canvas in a less public and crowded space. Thus, I chose to setup my intervention in a study room in my dorm building (West Village F). This allowed for participants to take a break from studying to draw whatever was on their mind. The results from this were unique to say the least.
Canvas before:
Canvas 24 hours later:
Upon first observing the changes, I noticed that there were not nearly as many drawings as i’d hoped there would be. All though this was saddening, I was still able to appreciate kirby, a volleyball, bubble tea, and a very awful drawing of spongebob dubbed “spong”.
The results were pretty indicative of the current mental state of those residing in my building. Although stressed by workload around midterms and nearing finals, students were still able to have fun in expressing themselves and displaying their work to others.