For my intervention I decided to have people from Isec and Ryder hall draw some robots. My idea first came up when we were talking about our intervention pitch for next week. I had a mix media art pad that I got for my 2d fundie class. I thought that I can have people draw stuff on it. The first idea that I had is having people from two location draw on the same paper. In the first location I would have people draw something cute and harmless on one side. Then at the other location I’ll cover the drawings on one side and have the people in the other location draw on the other. The prompt for the second group would be “draw things that will defeat the other side”. My idea is that people would draw dangerous and violent stuff that would attack the cute drawings. This is to demonstrate the idea of blindly follow direction. When thinking about the location I recall to when we played with the parachute. When we played the parachute in the common I saw a lot of people and some of them did participated. I thought maybe I can also conduct my intervention there too. During the intervention pitch meeting I had a second version of my idea. Coincidentally, we talked about a woman with a sign that says “draw on me” which is similar to my intervention idea. The second version will still involve two locations but the prompt will be the same for both locations. And the prompt will be vaguely worded to let the audience come up with their own interpretation. This way I can observe how people in two location think different and how the first drawing affects others interpretation. However, it is pointed out that this will heavily depend on the location. After many thought about the locations I decided to held it at Ryder and Isec hall. And the prompt must be relevant to both hall. Isec is more engineering and computer science centric hall. Ryder has more art and media students gather around. So I pull the two theme together and came up with having the people from the two hall draw robots. Students from Isec are familiar with robot and students from Ryder can express their creativity with drawings. My hypothesis before executing my intervention is that Isec students will draw more realistic robot like Roombas. And Ryder students will draw more creative robot like Gundam.
During Friday I decides to execute my intervention after game design. I looked around Ryder hall and noticed that there isn’t that many people, so I decide to go to Isec first. In Isec there were a lot of people studying and sitting around. So I stood outside the entrance where people would come and go. I held up my mix media with the word “Draw a robot of any kind” and marker to let people know that they can draw on it. People who walked by took a look at the pad before continue going. I waited for around 5 minutes standing like an idiot before someone came. It was a girl and she asked if she could draw. I answered yes and then she asked if this for a project and what class. A lot of people also asked this question. The robot that she drew is a conventional robot with boxing head and body and antenna. As time went by more people drew on the pad. In the end all the robot have a similar aesthetic in the form of a conventional robot. I believe that the first robot also influenced the others. The outlier is by a dude who’s with his friends, he drew the robot with the drill and whisk. Next is Ryder where I did it on Tuesday right before class. This time people are more willing to participate and I only have to wait aboutFff two minutes. The first robot is also a conventional robot however it’s more toy-like. It’s also the first time someone used more than one color in their robot. Then someone surprised me by drawing Doraemon which is a robot cat. The result was a lot different type of robots, people even drew laptop, car and claw. The last person participated asked if she could take a picture of the pad. She said that she have a similar project.
There is a lot of interesting result by comparing the two experiences and pictures. Students from Ryder are more likely to participate than Isec. I also noticed that in Isec, women are more willing to participate than men. Meanwhile, in Ryder both men and women have the same chance of participating. Everyone in Isec used only one color for their robot while 2 people used more than one color in Ryder. Ryder also has more unconventional robots, meaning that they think more outside the box. This has been a fun intervention and experiment.
Isec
Ryder
