SHOE PEOPLE
Research Practice
02/2020 - 03/2020
Brief
“There are many technologies built on data from its users to help connect people around the world but many of these systems can produce a feeling of isolation where connectivity is harder to obtain. In this project, our aim was to combat this feeling of isolation by understanding how people can feel connected within their own community. In order to understand this from a bottom-up perspective, we decided to research the ‘local’ and what this may mean for different communities. In this one month, we focus on our process, by field visit, design activities and performance on the street, to get those wield data. Finally, we showed our data by data visualization and proposed for the progression of “localization” to a UK company called FutureGov.
Process
For me, the most interesting and successful part of the shoe people project is the data collecting process. Instead of a direct interview, we came up with different activities to help us understand local in person. We followed and imitated local people. We put our camera on the road to record people’s shoes and pace. We measure people’s clothes’ length. We record decorations and accessories of people passing by. We collected hundreds of shoes and layered them to get the average local shoes. For a long time, I feel confused about this process as I thought it is just evidence to prove my point. However, in this project, we use these random and even sounds meaningless activities to get data that we can’t expect.
