Wednesday 31 March 2010

Design Safari

For this assignment, we had to go out of our comfort zone. I decided to observe the public and see what conclusions I could draw about people without actually speaking to them. I brought a notepad and pencil to a coffee shop in town and sat at the window watching the passers by. If I saw an interesting looking conversation between two stationary people, I would sketch them, and write down everything that came to my mind beside the drawings to help me remember each situation. One that springs to mind was a conversation I saw between a boy and a girl, who I am assuming were boyfriend and girlfriend. She stopped him in the street as they were walking and held both of his hands and looked like she was pleading with him in a lighthearted way about something. I decided she was trying to get him to meet her parents. He pulled away from her grasp, and his body language wasn’t positive at all. After a minute or two, they began walking again, whilst holding hands, except this time they both displayed a certain awkwardness, and they held each others hands much looser than before the “tiff”. I also observed an old man walking with his dog and talking to it as they walked together. I think he was very lonely, and I felt a bit sorry for him. I found myself making up little stories about each of the people I found to be the most interesting, from their favourite foods to family holidays they went on as children. I then became briefly paranoid that someone was sitting watching me watching people, and felt quite self conscious! After reading the book “Snoop”, I feel that I look at people and their possessions with a much more analytic eye. I also read a novel when I was younger, and in it the main character would follow people around shops to see what they buy and make up life stories about them, and I felt a bit like her. I enjoyed this assignment, even though it was slightly more formal, sometimes its nice to just sit back and watch the world go by.

No comments:

Post a Comment