Harvard Square Veritas
Why are the realities mixed? Why do people perceive public spaces differently?
On one hand, the nature features possessed by the public space provide raw material for people to create the mixture. On the other hand, the different background and previous experience people carry around with them offer the initial power to mix. For a book worm, the books inside the bookstore windows are door to paradise, while for a tree, they are dead bodies of their peers and the window is a grave yard. For tourists, the signage stores are different places to meet, while for typeface designers they may be cases to learn from. There are always more than one way to use and describe the same thing, and more than one thing to fit into the same description. With different aspects exemplified, references built and various interpretations made, the mille-feuilles of public space is created, and people are stuck within one or several particular layers.
The deciphering of the mixture often happened naturally and silently as the images of the space caught by people’s eyes and then melt into their minds with other existing fragments experience and memory. By creating our own stories and listening to those of the others, an opportunity is opened up to better understand both the space that physically keeps the mixture and people that mentally create and decipher it. No matter how irrelevant it seems for the other people, each interpretation inspired by the physical world is a corner of the iceberg “Veritas”. The stories leave hints and reveal the mental world of the storytellers. The interpretations of physical realm become bridges between the diverse layers of the space as well as people’s mental world.
In early experiments before the final project, I focused on the signage of stores around Harvard Square, trying to trace back the history and story behind the icons and typefaces. I also tried to research the content of Harvard different school shields. I had expected some coherence of context or value behind the designs to produce the most persuasive and pertinent visual representation of the institution. However, it turned out that design is not natural science with a chain along which you can deduce from the origin till the other end.
The subjective understanding and selection have great impact on final products. The dynamic randomness caught my interests and I wanted to know how far the boundary and how different people could be while perceiving the same but mixed reality. So for the final project, I decided to use images collected images around Harvard Square and remixed them with my own understanding and interpretation to create a set of cards to make a storytelling game based on the board game “Dixit”.
There will be 4-6 players. Each player has a same number of cards (4-5). One player is the storyteller for the turn. He looks at the cards in his hand, makes up a sentence triggered by the content of one card, and then say it to other players. The other players select amongst their own cards the one that best matches the sentence made up by the storyteller. Then, each of them gives their selected card to the storyteller, without showing it to the others. The storyteller shuffles his card with all the received cards. He then randomly places them face up on the table. The goal of the other players is to find which image is from the storyteller amongst the displayed ones. Each player secretly votes for the card that he believes belongs to the storyteller. Those who are correct will get credit, and whose card are mistaken as the storyteller’s will also get credits. As for the storyteller, he will get credit unless everybody or nobody is correct. This will prevent the storyteller to make a sentence too obvious, too vague or entirely irrelevant for the card.
By inviting people to take part in deciphering the mixed realities, I hoped to explore the boundary of both the physical and mental world, and offer a more interactive and engaging way for people to share memories, know the multiple layer of both the physical and mental world, and know each other, especially for new friends and blind date. The cards can also be used as postcards particularly for Harvard Square. People’s preference of a particular card is a sign of resonating and will represent their perception of the space, and convey the perception by sending it to others.