COLLABORATION

Stanford University, 2015   •   2 Week   •   Individual Project

The Concept
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I want to study, document and categorize different aspects of human behavior through their subtle physical gestures, interactions, the unsaid social and personal rules they follow. With this project I explore how two individuals work in collaboration, specifically study their physical interactions and their nonverbal communication:

Physical interactions
How people work together in physical collaboration to resolve a task? Are there any unsaid rules that they start to follow unknowingly? Is there a learning curve until they start doing the task effectively? Is there a natural leader between them?

Nonverbal communication
I wanted to create a verbal and visual documentation of the different gesture we use to indicate different information, instructions and feelings.

Social Experiments
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The video is the final piece/documentation of social experiments I conducted for this study. Two people are given a card each. Once they receive the card they weren’t allowed to communicate with each other. The card has the same word written on it, but they don't know this. Then they have to hold the same stylus and draw the word on their cards on the iPad. After they finish drawing, I ask them a few questions based on how they felt while they were drawing with their partner. All of their drawings were documented in video format and their reactions in audio format.

Please watch the video on full screen.

The Process
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A lot of interesting facts came across by watching people work together in an unusual way. It makes us question issues around power dynamics, social acceptance, competitiveness, dedication towards completion of a given task, assumed roles and responsibilities between two random people — and probably ourselves too?

I wanted to provoke them to think of the pains and joys of physical collaboration in today's world of increasing digital collaboration. More importantly the participants walked away with a better understanding of how they collaborate with others.