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Is storytelling an effective tool to identify cross-cultural commonalities among diverse individual experiences?
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UX/UI Design
Up Close, Far Away
Up Close, Far Away is visual storytelling website exploring possible cross-cultural commonalities across diverse human experiences. This exploration is framed by a monthly topic that contributors can respond to. The website is meant to host waves of participation in that visitors can submit their own responses to the current topic, allowing the website to grow organically. The experience explored (in this prototype, immigrating/moving to a new country) could change each month to feature other topics and other contributors.
Contributors were asked to send in two types of media to tell their stories. The first are photographs: of things that are important to them or that they identify with in their daily life in the USA; they were also asked to send photographs that were taken before they came to the USA. The second are audio reflections: on how they experienced immigrating. These elements are organized so the user can continuously scroll through each contributor's photos, and within each story, the contributor's audio recording will play describing their experience.
While contributors stay as anonymous as they'd like, this project aims to utilize the camera itself (as well as the documentary photograph it produces) as a tool to bring people from diverse backgrounds together through visual storytelling—rather than to set a physical barrier between the photographer and subject/reality.
View the entire website here. All photographs by contributors.
Role /
Designer
Community Outreach
Year /
2016
Contributors /
many
UX/UI Design
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The design of the website remained very neutral to give focus to the stories being told. The one page website utilizes continuous scrolling to flow through the contributors' stories. To indicate the beginning of each contributor's story, there is an audio button containing the contributor's voice recording.
Questions for Contributors to Consider
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1. Are you staying in the USA permanently or are you here for a shorter amount of time (i.e. for study)?
2. If you had to sum up moving in two words, what would they be?
3. What was the most difficult part about assimilating into a new culture?
4. What do you miss most about your home country?
5. Do you more closely identify with other immigrants or with folks born in the USA?
6. Do you remember moving? What was that experience like?
7. What is a sight, smell, color, texture, or food you associate with your home country and why?
8. How do you imagine/envision your life would have been like had you never left your home country? How does your life in the USA differ from that?
9. Are there any opportunities you are pursuing here in the USA that you would not have been able to elsewhere?
Outcomes
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Contributors were contacted after the prototype was completed and those that reviewed their contributions along with others' enjoyed listening to the diverse stories and noticing not only similar themes, but also very different perspectives on how life in the USA compares to the countries they were born.
It was especially interesting for me, someone who has not had this experience, to note that some consider the USA very friendly while others consider it cold in comparison to their home country.
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