Spring 2021 – Persuasion | CMU School of Design

d ; ECOlivery

Spring 2021

Overview

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an exponential increase in delivery in general as people start to avoid leaving their homes for safety. This includes food delivery as well, and one main problem with this exponential increase in food delivery is the excessive use of plastic containers. In fact, the majority of the plastic containers are actually not recyclable because of the contamination from food residue. This means that most of the plastic containers we have recycled are most likely being landfilled, which is a serious problem to start thinking about especially because we are using more delivery plastic containers than we ever had before. In this project, I wanted to do something that can persuade people to somehow participate in settling down this issue of excessive use of plastic containers that cannot be recycled.

Service

I designed a service where a delivery app creates their own eco-friendly package containers to sell as a monthly sponsorship. I’ve created my own delivery service called d ; ECOlivery, but this service can honestly be applied to any other delivery service apps as well. Restaurants will be buying the eco-friendly package containers monthly to use it for their food delivery, but this will also allow restaurants to earn sponsorship as well.

In the app, there is a pop up to notify users that eco-friendly package container service is offered in the application, and there is a separate category just for stores that use eco-friendly packaging. By making a separate category, it allows users to look at what the “eco” category is once more. Restaurants that have bought the monthly eco-friendly package containers from the service app will be sponsored and filtered up to the top of the list for each food category, which will make people look through these stores (that bought and use eco-friendly packaging) first than any other stores in the app.

The main method I’ve used is visual persuasion and framing, where I have offered specific visuals to make people learn about the eco-friendly packaging service (like the pop-up and separate category for “eco”). In fact, the whole concept of using the sales of eco-friendly packaging as a sponsorship to filter stores to be in the top of the list is also a method of persuasion that motives users to look at stores that they see at first glance.

Teens Be Heard

Spring 2021

Overview

Our project Teens Be Heard is a response to the role of teen stories and voices in media, and how they effect the goals and culture of real teens. The role of teen voices in modern media is a powerful and dangerous one. In television and movies, teens are shown with sex and drug filled lives, normalizing an unhealthy appetite for excitement that could warp young viewers and their perceptions of reality. We see this through instagram, tiktok, etc, as teens and younger kids are learning from television that they should be perceived as adults, and thus they start to act this way. Engaging with their lives in this way makes teens more likely to engage with drugs, self harm, and dangerous situations involving their assumed identity of someone who should be sexualized.

Goals

Our event, Teens Be Heard is an event meant to reach out to both teenagers who are concerned/unaware of this trend, and industry entertainment writers who write for teen voices. The goal of bringing these groups together, by a teen curated set of events and presentations, is to offer up alternatives to writing these characters other than writing them and portraying them as adults. By offering up their own written prose about their lives and ideas, and explaining how harmful current writing trends can be, hopefully there will be an impact on how these characters can be written in the future to protect the young people they are targeted to identify with.

Our event also allows teens to have a foray into the writing industry, and offers opportunities for interested participants (both organizers and attendees) to speak with professionals in the industry.

Visual Campaign

Our artifacts consist of a brochure listed for the event and a poster, both containing details about what the event will entail as well as some of the events that will take place there.

PhoneLess

Spring 2021

Yufei Wang (P)

[ A physical wearable product that encourages people to spend less time watching phones while dining with others ]

As phones slowly and steadily integrate into our daily lives, people can easily spend a considerable amount of time on their phones without noticing it. Having a little entertainment before bed, during breaks, or on the dinner table is not uncommon. While people are spending more than 7 hours of their day on screens, studies also have shown that using the phone during a meal with families and friends can make everyone at the table feel less satisfied, including the one who used the phone. To help people keep track of the time they had spent on their phones and make dining with friends and families a better experience, we propose PhoneLess, a wrist band that keeps track of the time the user had spent on their phones and remind people to put down their phones after a certain period of time.

The Art of Parenting

Spring 2021

Alice Cai (Communications), Annalisa Pao (Products)

We all remember the awkward day when we sat down and had “the Talk” with our parents. Or do we?

Many parents forego having what society has labeled “difficult” conversations about sex, gender, and sexuality with their children. This can be for a number of reasons: fearing that their child will lose their innocence, thinking that they might tell their child too much, believing that discussion of these topics might encourage their children towards unwanted experimentation, etc. While intended to be in the best interest of the child, this parenting style, which we have named the Connect-the-Dots approach, creates a rigid framework that a child is expected to follow. By not providing resources and open dialogue in the formative years of self-discovery, parents raise their child in a manner that presents numerous challenges with emotional and physical consequences.

Instead, we propose that parents should follow what we call the Blank Canvas approach. Rather than outlining a path, parents should provide the tools and foundation for their child to discover their own identity in a safe, happy, and healthy way. Parents do not have to be experts in every topic—they just need to provide an open, safe, and non-judgmental environment to have open conversations with their children.

^Explore parent and child testimonials on experiences with Connect the Dots approach and Blank Canvas approach.

Our interactive article is meant to persuade parents to provide their child with a Blank Canvas. It provides real stories of how children raised on the Connect-the-Dots approach were affected and provides insights into how some parents are tackling a Blank Canvas approach with their own children. The article also offers key organizations, educational articles, and comprehensive resource guides so that parents have a strong starting point to begin these conversations.

Resources and Articles for further reading

Interact with our prototype here: https://www.figma.com/proto/IQ6XEkcORTyC6dI8skvJY2/Destigmatize-Sex?node-id=4%3A28&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=0%3A1

Museum of Childhood Things

Spring 2021

Caroline Song (C), Jamie Park (C), and Jina Lee (C) / 2D graphics, visual campaign design
Tactics: Emotional engagement, visual persuasion, relatability/empathy, framing (past experiences)

Overview

“We didn’t get to choose the childhood we were given, but we can choose what to do with the stuff of our childhood memories.”

It is sometimes difficult for families to relate to one another. Now, with the pandemic, we see families even more unable to connect, in person or at all. We have created a visual campaign promoting a pop-up museum in 2025 filled with childhood artifacts from each generation. This pop-up museum serves as a space for multi-generational families to come together to learn more about each generations’ childhood artifacts, and how that has shaped who each person is today. We see this museum as a conversation starter for families, and a time for each member to develop empathy and understanding for one another. We want to convey a safe environment that will allow families connect emotionally with one another, ultimately bringing them closer together.

Visual Campaign

Our group played to our strengths through creating a visual campaign in which we balanced the use of color, typography, and graphics to persuade visitors to come to our museum. Because the target audience of our museum are multi-generational families, we wanted to create and convey a welcoming, warm experience that is intended for all ages. This was done with the use of bright but soft colors (blues, pinks, yellows, and greens), simplistic rounded shapes and icons, and the use of familiar toy objects that viewers may have used as a child.

We chose to tackle creating both printed and digital assets in order to account for the wide range of ages that we are trying to target and to really cater towards multi-generational families. Potential visitors will be informed and hopefully attracted to the museum through promotional printed posters that will be hung all over Pittsburgh. We also created a digital campaign, which will be spread using the Instagram platform to attract younger viewers. For the social media feed, our group used this opportunity to use nostalgia and relatability in order to appeal to our younger audience (Millenials, Gen Z), using images from their childhoods (crocs, silly bands, Britney Spears) and also incorporating comments from actual museum visitors to establish more legitimacy.

Our team also created assets that the visitors can view and interact with once they are in the museum, in order to enhance the experience for them. One of the items we created was an overall map so that visitors are able to anticipate and understand where they are in the museum, and what exhibits will be shown in what order. We continued to keep these assets playful and welcoming to keep visitors engaged and really emphasize this safe environment that we aimed to created.

There is signage that will be placed at the start of every new exhibit so that viewers can, once again, understand where they are in the museum experience as they travel through the different generation exhibits.

Museum visitors will also be handed a brochure with an interactive activity that they can fill out throughout their time in the museum, and even after they leave. This brochure is meant to allow each visitor to reflect on the objects, ideas, and trends, that influenced them during their childhood and how these things have shaped their childhood memories and the person that they have become today. After internal reflection, visitors are encouraged to reflect externally as well, through conversations with their family members. Through sharing these reflections, families can understand their differences further, and also find some similarities to relate to. In all, this brochure aims to truly drive home the idea of our museum as a conversation starter to bring families closer together through increased empathy and a greater understanding of one another.

Humanize Us

Spring 2021, Uncategorized

Patricia Yu (P), Julia Sanders (C), Sarah Lee (P) / Series of digital campaign posters

Tactics: behavior change, emotional engagement, visual persuasion

OVERVIEW

A future has emerged in which humans have become inseparable with their personified physical objects and treat them as intimate companions. This awakens a group of people’s awareness in trying to combat this addiction. Humanize Us is a society that has the mission to campaign against our machines. They protest for technology to become less humanized as the population begins to lose their independence and unique self-identity.

BACKGROUND

As society heads into a future where technology becomes increasingly more intimate in our lives, people are romantically invested in our technological systems and rely on them for almost every aspect. This is mainly inspired by popular media and people’s general fascination about the future between our relationship with our technology. One example is seen from the movie Her.

Our envisions on the future is founded on our realities as well. Signs of over-reliance and addiction are apparent:

According to a study by Penn State, 77% said that society as a whole relied too much on technology to succeed.

According to Trendhunter, 66% of the population suffers from nomophobia (the fear of having “no mobile”) today.

In our project, we explore how this accrued over-reliance on technology begins to urge people to notice the disastrous future we are headed in and aim to awaken people’s awareness in trying to combat against this addiction. The goal is to make technology dehumanized.

Using our campaigns from the future, we hope to guide people in our present world to question what it means to “humanize” our technology.

CAMPAIGN SERIES

Our campaign digital posters utilize the use of emotional engagement with dramatic imagery, such as the “bleeding” robotic arm and the uncomfortable image of a robotic “woman” surrounded by gazing men. These images contradict each other and evoke thoughts of what is exactly going on in the scene. We hope that by creating these juxtapositional posters — each one with a different reflection of our relationship with technology — it can visually persuade people of the future who are over-reliant on their machines to deeply reflect on their well-being and begin to have more awareness on their reality. Our campaign is meant to allow people to join an organization, Humanize Us, that fights back against the social influences promoting this addiction.