Last week I went to sit in Hubert’s chair (Hubert is the president of the international comity) and he told me about a project portraying the international students here around Mälardalens högskola. The idea is to show the Swedes around here who these students are. Swedes (sorry for the generalization again) are rather reserved and see these students are representing a country instead of a person who might be a lot closer when you look at them as an individual. Also they are not that interested in making contact; “why make friends if they leave in half a year” (Jonas Stier, 2008).
The idea is to make a portrait of a number of international students including photos from their ‘home’ “back home” and the home they created here. Their own portrait – face – as a bridge between these two environments.
Together with Nikki, I was invited to join this project as interaction designer. Yesterday we had the first meeting over a fika in the student restaurant Kåren. Apart from Hubert ans us there were four others, of which one photographer. The rest I hope to get to know better in their roles here (I know some from the hiking); for the next meeting we planned to see what we came up and to devide the (flexible) tasks based on that :)
One of the ideas from this first brainstorm was from beauty product commercials enlarging a wrinkel on a persons skin and displaying facts about that part. The idea is to encircle the wrinkels in the students faces – as experiences in their lives, moments they laughed and cried – and to link these to the photographs around.
I really like the creative mood this whole projects gets me in again. The courses mainly got me in a philosophical mood. I miss the moments with Roy (a classmate from HKU) in which we just tried weird experiments without any direct goal. I got the feeling that these moments came from all the creative projects at HKU.
Tags: creativity, differences similarities variations, experience, friends, generalization, home, homesickness, interaction, laughing, nikki, stereotypes, swedes, world view
Categories: a cultural journey, an intellectual journey
[...] together with Hubert and Nikki – to some buildings here in Eskilstuna as possible locations for the exhibition we’re working [...]