Artwork #3: Intervene Final
Ilayda Hanci
“Good Vibes”
Motivation plays an important role in our society because it provides the drive for people to accomplish their goals, maintain their responsibilities or solve problems. The main idea of my game intervenes with people’s emotional states. Motivation can be created or re-sparked by simply anything. Motivation can be difficult for people who work in professional office settings where they may feel their hard work goes unnoticed or the constant pressures of a competitive environment wear them down. Moreover, we know that the biggest problem about our current education system is; it did not motivate students. I want to show with my piece that, everybody needs good stuff in their life and they can smile by playing a simple and an easy game.
For this piece, I made a sign declaring that everybody needs something in their life and they can just simply acquire that by taking the word they need from the board. The goal was directly intervening with people’s needs and desires about what they want in their life and what they desire the most to get.
My piece is a large Bristol Board with 14 piece of words attached to it. On the paper is the following: “Please take whatever you need today and choose to believe”. I think it has its own charm. When looking through the readings, I mostly influenced by Yoko Ono’s pieces as she asks the question to audience and lets the audience to create the piece. She definetly has a different style to impact people with her acts and pieces, and I followed her path in this project.
In a various number of places and at various times of day I put the sign and waited. In the public busy places, it took very little attention. Part of that was no doubt people were all the time on their phone while walking away from it or too busy to look at it. The first place that took place for this piece was the Ruggles Station since it is very busy with the students and workers. I posted the board to a place where everyone can see easily while they are heading to school or to work, so they can just take a word they want, want to do, or need in their life to motivate themselves. But it didn’t work that well since everybody was too busy to catch the bust or the train and there were a lot of people so they didn’t read the message at all.
Then I moved the sign to the International Village. The sign did get a few glances, but a few stopped to read it and pick the words they need. Most of the time people were too busy looking at their phones all the time without noticing the things around them. This piece also helped me to analyze people about what was the reaction when they saw it and the influence of the smartphones in people’s daily lives. 6 out of 10 people were on their phone even if someone in front of them stopped to look at the piece.
To do list for the final:
- Change the design of the board
- Put it next to the elevators in IV
- Add word “free” for example “Free Happiness”
- Add little cute creatures to invite people
After the first iteration of my piece, I changed the design of the board to be more friendly and attractive to people who are reading it. Adding the word “free” and a little bit humor to it made people notice the board more than before. And even they didn’t pick a word, they found the design very cute by means of the cute little creatures. I again used the International Village elevators as a location because people were always waiting in the line for an elevator and it is very crowded and busy in the morning so they either look at their phones or look around the posters near the elevator to pass time while waiting. People mostly didn’t want to get filmed or photographed because they felt being watched or get uncomfortable and run away when they noticed my phone, so I put the sign up and come back a couple of hours later. I saw they most of the words were ripped out so the new design I think worked better.
Pictures:
First Iteration Design:
Final Design:
