MIXED

Interviewing 20 multicultural MIT students

May 2017

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MOTIVATIOn

As a Japanese-American who lived in Hong Kong and Singapore for a total of 11 years, I always found it challenging to connect with a single cultural identity. For this project, I wanted to start a conversation with people in the MIT community who also identified as culturally ambiguous and create a discussion on what it meant to be multicultural.

I started by drafting some questions and ideas I had for these students, as well as some preliminary sketches on the visualization.

INTERVIEWS

I emailed out to several dorm lists on campus and instantly received replies from students interested in the project. I spent about an hour with student, first asking them specific questions about their identity, then letting them tell me anything else they wanted to share. Here are some memorable parts of the 20 interviews I conducted.

DRAFT 

After conducting all the interviews,  I wanted to capture the stories they shared with me accurately. I found that their facial features and visual appearance played a big role in how they were perceived so I wanted to link each person's face with their story. However, I realized that dumping all the information in a single poster didn't quite do the students justice. I also wanted to retake all the photos for a neutral expression since not all the experiences they had were necessarily positive.

Final 

The following are screenshots and a video from the final interactive visualization. 

Zip file of Processing sketches can be downloaded here.