Assignment #7: Interventionist Design

Project #1: Recreation of a website:


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21175376/webproject/NPRneutral.html


For this project I chose to work with NPR. I chose to work with NPR because I feel that it is a relatively neutral news source. I think it's interesting how people choose their news, how they talk about it and what their expectations are. For example, I find it interesting when I hear people say, "The news is too depressing or too sad" and they cannot watch it. Or others who have opposite feelings- that they don't hear enough of the tragedy that is going on and everything in between. All of these ideas about mood and the news kept bringing me back to the idea that people don't always seem to want reality or truth. Truth being elusive - I thought focusing in on the mood of news would be an interesting study. What words change to make something happy or positive- to the point where it might even be absurd? What words make something more dire and sombre and swing in the opposite direction? What kinds of words change to create the content? Nouns mostly? Adjectives? I used various sources to develop the language and words selected in each of the pages. 


I chose to start with NPR as the neutral webpage and create a 3 point scale of mood for the news from very sad, sad, neutral/current website, happy, to super happy. I reworked the same articles and changed the words- nouns, adjectives, etc. and altered them to fit the mood selected by the viewer. I built the site so that the viewer will be able to interact with the webpage and choose which mood they prefer. Expanding this to add two more moods and creating secondary links to stories would be an interesting addition to this project. 


Here is a partial screenshot of each of the webpages:

Project #2: Public Art Intervention:


I created a series of postcards, each with a celebrity mother on the front- 2 different images of each woman. One of them sexual in some way and the other of them breastfeeding their baby.

There have been a number of celebrity mothers criticized recently for either breastfeeding in public or for sharing photos of them breastfeeding their babies. Many mothers, not just celebrities, have run into this serious problem where they are being discriminated against for breastfeeding their babies in public despite their legal rights to do so.

I am juxtaposing the two images next to each other on the postcard with a quote I found from Lisa Latham from Bitchfest that states, “Everyone Wants to See Your Breasts...Until Your Baby Needs Them.” I think this quote embodies the double edge sword American society places on mothers and women in general. Using celebrities hits the message home since you can easily identify the complexity of one recognizable woman.

On the back of the postcards - there are three versions- each with quotes regarding the benefits of breastfeeding from authoritative sources, American Academy of Pediatrics, The American Public Health Association, and the World Health Organization.

These postcards would be placed around the city of Reno- anyplace where ordinary postcards can be found. Coffee shops, hospitals, schools, doctor's offices- stores that sell postcards- such as convenience stores, pharmacies, and souvenir shops. They could be passed out around downtown or around campus. The idea would be to spread the message and make society more aware of the need to change and for people to discuss the issue.


Below are the postcard images: