HOME AND BELONGING SURVEY
Interactive and Participative Survey Experiment
The primary purpose of the experiment was a survey, but instead of adopting a traditional question-answer method with an interview or form, I tried to develop something that made the survey more like a ‚happening‘ participative workshop. Since the topic open to personal interpretations, the survey participants needed to have freedom and not predefined answers or methods to choose from. I decided to have an open-ended question that the participants could answer on a blank piece of paper.
The participants were informed that the answer could be a single word or a story, and there was no pressure to fit into a particular category. Then depending on the answer, they could choose a color to symbolize the emotion of their response and leave a fingerprint on their paper. The final step was to stitch the individual answers with the other participants to create a paper trail. As the project‘s research target audience is young adults, a college campus was chosen as the location for the survey.
Industry: Arts and Culture
Services: Exhibition Design
Role: Thesis Workshop
The idea was to create a chain of feelings about the topic. The stitching was a symbolic interaction connecting the people‘s emotions on a topic of social importance. The visual color coding was to serve as an aesthetic infographic that can, at a glance, show the participants and the non-participants (the passersby) the answers from other people. Initially, we would start the survey only with two broad categories of orange and green, each symbolizing people and place, respectively. During the survey,
the participants were given the option to create new categories according to the emotion of their answers. This provides the participants with broader freedom and does not force them to fit within the given categories. Fingerpainting the colors created a
feeling of leaving your fingerprints on your answers, symbolic of leaving your impressions on the people you meet and footprints on the places you visit. The poster served as a starting point for thoughts and understanding of the topic. However, most of the communication was done verbally, which also helped me to engage with people personally and further discuss the topic. At the same time, the design can serve as a reminder advertising for further project events.
The survey was conducted on 03.06.2022 for 6 hours. I executed it with the help of two volunteers: Edanur Secim to approach the prospective participants and talk to them about the survey and Reem Asfour for the documentation.
Audience Research Results:
Below are the scans from a few of the answers collected during the survey. The text shows a vast variety of definitions of home that each person can have for themselves.
As seen in these images of the survey and the infographic below, most people associate the feeling of being home with people, as an emotion, or even both. Very few people consider having a home connection with a place or land, and if they do, then only about another feeling. At the same time, out of 32 participants, only one felt the need to use the yellow culture category with their answers.