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.
What a family could look like in our present day is broad and the norms and expectations of families are constantly changing. Even still, the laws related to families have remained fairly unchanged and limit the capabilities of families that aren’t within the norm and create unhealthy stigmas that prevent people from establishing family and family roles that suits their needs in life and makes them feel fulfilled. The many norms that are used as examples when educating people about families that prevent people from seeing and understanding families that don’t fit that norm. This prevents families with unique issues from having their voice heard and the issues/discrimination they face addressed. Monogamous, heterosexual, nuclear families are the norm, but they don’t have to be. By having this norm, we have created an unintentional social heirarchy surrounding families, leading other types of families wants/needs to be devalued or not considered in certain scenarios.
The lack of awareness of diverse family types has been a major issue in the past. In U.S. education systems and elsewhere, often times the types of relationships and families discussed are very limited. For our project we designed an online learning activity for elementary and middle school age students to inform them on different types of families and the issues that they face because of certain discriminatory policies. Some examples we thought of were a single person being waitlisted for years when trying to adopt a child or a family with LGBTQ+ members in it facing certain stigmas that can cause psychological damage. The scenario we chose to present was for a chosen family trying to see a loved one in a hospital that restricts visitation to immediate family. We chose to depict this group specifically becaise we felt this family types is the least discussed type of family within the education system and so the stories and dilemas chosen families face goes unheard or misunderstood.
Our experience is intended to flow from learning about different family types to building them online and then informing them of narratives that these specific family types might face. At the beginning they would be prefaced with information on the experience and be asked to make a family or their family. After they finish that they would be informed on societal norms and the reality of diverse families and the need to understand their unique issues. After that, they would learn about a specific type of family and they would be asked to design the characters who will represent the people of a certain family type that will then be used in a narrative later. They would be able to change the appearance of characters as well assign names and pronouns to allow for participants to connect with the characters and feel as though they had some input into the story. When they complete this, the story will then be visualized for them using the characters they designed.
By the end of the experience we hope participants will be able to empathize with the unique problems different families and understand how societal norms around families have impacted
Shannon Ha (Products), Elizabeth Han (Environments)
In the speculative future of 2030, the bad actors of social media activism run rampant amongst young adults, especially college students. Many use performative activism on social media as a way to display outward projections of social awareness, when in reality, their ignorance and reposting does nothing to contribute to a social movement. Our intervention is Introspect, two voice AI characters ‘Guiding Light’ and ‘Inner Shadow’, built into existing social media platforms. ‘Introspect’ encourages people who post or repost about social movements to question their own motives behind doing so and ultimately change their ways of thinking over time by evolving the types of questions being asked. The hope is that people can form their own opinion about performative activism by interacting with the dialogues. As the user ultimately decides what to post, regardless of the advice, the power is in their hands.
The Voices: ‘Guiding Light’ and ‘Inner Shadow’
Guiding Light and Inner Shadow represent two ends of a spectrum in critical thinking. ‘Guiding Light’ helps users progress through their ‘activist’ journey by questioning their motivations to promote deeper reflection and by also suggesting meaningful acts of contribution to their social cause of interest. ‘Inner Shadow’ enables the user to act upon their mindless social media habits and encourages outward projections of social awareness as opposed to intentional acts. The hope is that people can form their own opinion about performative activism by interacting with the dialogues. Since the user ultimately decides what to post, regardless of the advice, the power is in their hands.
Progress Over Time: ‘Guiding Light’ At All Levels
Advanced Suggestions over time
Overtime, the ‘Guiding Light’ would give more advanced suggestions based on the level of activism the user has engaged in. The ‘Guiding Light’ not only suggests more challenging resources for advancing users, but also asks more provocative questions for the users to come to their own conclusion about what activism means for them. This would guide the users towards viewing activism as a lifelong journey, rather than a momentary gesture.
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.
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.
