User:Louisateichmann

Growing Heroes

reflection practice project cultural diversity

collaborate effort +Kim Roest and Esther van Asselt

As the startingpoint of our research we analysed the artwork „Facial casts of Nias Islanders“ by JP Kleiweg de Zwaan. It shows a collection of lifesized casts of heads, which was created in 1910 as an anthropolical study of the inhabitants of the colonized Nias Island in Indonesia. 42 captures faces, their eyes closed, their humanity and dignity stolen, exposed indefinitely. What do we take away from this piece in the context of cultural diversity? These men have been dehumanized, since their identity has been reduced to their facial features. This is relevant, because people have been and still are reduced to their given features. Born into boundaries, born into gender, skin colour, heritage. A persons identity is always bound to these given visual hints, for people to speculate on the traits of another person‘s self. This brings up the question of what would happen if a person could recreate themselves free from boundaries, „making the inside match the outside“ so to say. In our digital age we see this happening in video games. A menu is given to the player with functions to customize a character. Name, gender, features, clothing. A given set of options for the player to choose from. Consiquently we tried to think about where in our society people are forced into existing structures to find a context in which it would be useful to place this concept of free expression. We found that children are being corrected by society to fit into their given role. If you are born a boy, you will be laughed at for keeping your hair long and playing with dolls. If you are a girl, you should be soft and sweet. We found that children are exposed to media from a very young age and formats such as children cartoons play a big role in the way children are shown their place in society and the roles they should follow. If a child is only consuming shows with beautiful, white, heterosexual characters, such onesided stories, it is to be expected that this child will feel like anything outside these lines will be wrong. Representation in media is important, since it has a big impact on the self-confidence and acceptance of children. This is why we wanted to find out what happens if children get to recreate themselves without boundaries and get a bigger say in what is shown in children‘s cartoons. We imagined a format in which children get to create a virtual character for themselves, which is later shown on tv in a series called „Diversitales“, where the characters are created by kids and adress issues such as bullying, mental health and (lgbt) sexuality in order to expose children to a more diverse, accepting way of being. To experiment what possible outcomes of creating a second self could be, we created an online questionnaire. We found the diverse results very interesting and definitely found that people enjoyed reimagining themselves in the frame of superheroes. We decided to try this with children aged 5 to 9, rephrase our questions in simpler ways and let them draw themselves as superheroes. Consiquently we invited five children and interviewed them about TV shows, own character traits and the creation of their virtual self. They created heroes in the form of dresses, cats and fashion designers, but most importantly we found that the children cared more about what their heroes could do to help others instead of what would be in it for themselves. Inspired by their answers, we decided to reframe the project into three lessons who are taught to adults by the kids on how to become a real hero. These lessons were „reimagine yourself“, „set goals“ and „question everything“. For each lesson we created an individual video clip with advice of the kids, published on a youtube channel called „growing heroes“, the new title of our project. In that way we tried to make the link between fiction and real life. Giving children a voice and acknowledging their point of view was an important factor or our project.We started the project with a concern of stereotyping based on looks and ended it with stereotyping based on age, as we put children in the unusual position of a teacher. However, this change of position could have been reinforced in our exhibition. The themes of „power of definition“ and „single story“ were more appearent in earlier stages of the project, when we planned to create more diverse cartoons for children. The limited time made us seek solutions to frame our content and create an exhibition which didn‘t fulfill the potential of our project. While remaining the inspirational essence of the children‘s interviews, we failed to make a sharp, critical statement. In hindsight, choosing children from troubled backgrounds such as syrian refugees could have enriched the message and depth of our project. After filming the interviews, we had a hard time narrowing our story and message down into a compact new creation, since we touched a variety of subjects in our process. In the context of cultural diversity, this project lacked context and a clear positioning of us as designers, yet in a broader social context it succeeded in its collaborativity. As a group we came a long way from our initial starting point and enjoyed to see our ideas come to live. I‘m still fascinated by customizable virtual characters and see this as a topic I can still explore further. Maybe letting people create themselves in that way and comparing the real life character to the virtual one would have been better fitted for cultural diversity. Anyways I felt like I learned a lot by working with children and I really enjoyed working with people from different departments.