Gathering Voices

As this project was aiming to cater to the public, I want to gain an archive of joyful moments from people. As not only would this this allow me to directly embed the communities voices within the project, but it will also ensure that my project remains open and covers joy from all perspectives. By gathering this data early on, it will also give me a head start in experimenting with different responses and outcomes. To do this, I’ve decided to create a one question survey – simply asking people to describe what brings them joy. As it’ll be such a short and simple survey I hope that this would encourage more people to engage with it – the fact that Survey Monkey also allows people to submit their answers anonymously is a huge benefit as it will make people feel safe writing what they want without worry of judgement.

As I’m asking people to submit quite personal information, I thought it would be best to keep the text within the survey as light-hearted and friendly as possible. By setting a leading example at the end, I hoped to break the ice a little, prompting people to open up about their own small moments of joy.

Link to the survey > https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/LWCD5VH

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Although this project is going to be based between Skipton and Leeds, joy in whatever form it comes, can be shared be all. For this reason I decided to put my survey out for all to answer. Using social medias as a base as well as word of mouth through friends I managed to spread the word and gather a decent amount of responses within the first day. This was more than enough to get me started on some visual experiments.

Reading through the responses was truly heart warming, there was just something so pure and humbling knowing that there are these little pockets of joy within everyone’s day to day life. The responses came in all shapes and sizes, some were extremely personal to themselves whereas others were extremely relatable situations that most people will come across in their lives. However each one came with their own version of joy – which opened my eyes to just how versatile joy as a concept can be.

I began filtering through the responses and picking out some highlights to use to develop some visual responses – this in itself was actually quite a hard process as there were just so many brilliant ones, so I just focused on ones that told the story or the moment as clearly as possible. As I was forming the survey, I did think that I would be using these responses as a jump pad to create some unique visual responses, however these snippets of joy were already so powerful and raw that it seemed a waste not to use them as they were. So instead, I began forming some text based designs. To include some visuals as well, I started by the responses over fitting images I had taken previously in the year. As this was seemingly going to end up being a series of images, I created the hashtag #capturingjoy to add on to each design, this means that if I wanted to, this project has the potential to create a following online too.

Unfortunately I just found that the the text and images were taking power away from each other rather than emphasising the overall message. I do want to find ways that I can include photos and/or videos along with some text as a base, but this week I couldn’t quite figure out that balance.

Instead, I began to focus on the words themselves. Reading the text alone on the back end of SurveyMonkey was enough to bring me with a feeling of joy, so what is the point of adding extra noise to the original message? Using the font themes I had created in the project proposals, I began to play around with colour themes and layouts.

Although these aren’t a finished concept, I’m already so much happy with how these turned out. Have the text over one solid colour brings a stillness to each of the moments within the text, allowing the viewer to perhaps envision they’re there themselves, or at least begin to stop and consider what it would feel like. The lack of visual automatically engages people imaginations and sparks the chances of day dreams or memories to seep through. Have these kind of images in busy, public places holds the potential to slow peoples minds down and increase their chances of noticing more moments of joy around them.

To gain insight to what these text based designs would like like in a real space, I’ve created these mock ups showing them in a shopping centre and a underground station. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any that looked like the stations I’m actually looking at, so I’ll have to get some photos myself and redo this later down the line.