Brief #2 – Week 2
Moving forward with this project I decided to focus mainly on my first experiment, the one about anthropomorphism. I thought it would be interesting to give the fish a personality and a story purely based on human characteristics and the perceptions of people. The brief calls for us to reconfigure the purpose and meaning of the set, I thought that making this collection of scientific drawings into a more open set based on a social science/psychology experiment was in line with the assignment.
The aim in this second part of the investigation is to ask more questions. I will design a questionnaire/survey where I will be trying to put the fish more humanised contexts so we can give them human-like qualities and emotions.
First I designed a basic questionnaire so I could ask about age, gender, personality type and occupation.
I collected the information I got from the survey and I sorted the images accordingly. In this questionnaire I only asked about gender, age, occupations and personality types. I thought that it would be interesting to make them even more relatable and give them fictional narratives based on what people thought of them. Again, this is purely based on human perceptions. So in order to do so, I had to go back and ask even more questions.
- Who would be a good dancer?
- Who would be a parent?
- Who likes to cook?
- Who can play an instrument? or sing?
- Who would be good at sports?
- Who would be vegan/vegetarian?
- Who likes to read?
- Who’s good at maths?
- Who’s unemployed?
- Who is good at drawing or painting?
- Select the fish you think would ________.
- etc. – encourage people to say whatever comes to mind.
While observing the fish through these “lenses of value” I am putting them in boxes according to human systems. Why do we follow these systems? – I’ll save that one for later.
Feedback, observations & ways to move forward:
- Collect the new data and continue the narrative part.
- Research about ethic and Anthropomorphism (charismatic megafauna as umbrella species).
- Could recategorise them using the new information obtained.
- Elaborate their background stories and work on their character development.
- Illustrate the fish in a more human “cartoon” way, exaggerating their distinct characteristics, especially their facial features.
- Could make a Pokemon card – Tinder profile hybrid where I can display each illustration, the data I collected about age, gender, etc. and the fictional narrative. So basically design a profile for each fish where I can display, in a very human way, their qualities, characteristics and hobbies.