Brief
In this project, I was researching the topic of advice. Sometimes we give much advice and instructions to our children that could limit their creative path and limit their experience in discovering by experimenting. Moreover, advice given to friends can also transformed into constraints in some conditions that could affect individuals’ life decisions. Nevertheless, advice and constraints are important to help people make decisions in their lives and help them not get lost with many directions to choose from. Advice always stem from previous traditions, customs, and experiences that may have a relationship to the current situation or may just stem from a duty we have to perform.
Challenge
I was trying to identify the obstacles that may arise in the process of giving or receiving advice. I explored some problems such as “the uncertainty of goals & values”, “self-centred advice”, “ego bias”, “vague advice”, “excessive choices”, etc. Perspective-taking was one of the strategies to avoid these problems, Imagined-self or imagined-other. Actually, in my point of view, this could be worse as feelings, customs, traditions, and background cannot be transferable to get a clear image.
Goals
Trying to encourage individuals to unpack traditions that
are stuck in their mind background to be free of unneeded
constraints in a more complex world.
Unique Solution
I tried to reach that aim by finding some simple and funny examples that were not related directly to any religion because my aim is not to evaluate but just to encourage a wide range of audiences to rethink their unneeded constraints and share what they found sharable not what could hurt other feelings. This also could lead to a common ground that builds connections between individuals from different backgrounds far from politics.
Research
Origin of the word advice
Middle English: from Old French avis, based on Latin ad ‘to’ + visum, past participle of videre ‘to see’. The original sense was ‘way of looking at something, judgement’, hence later ‘an opinion given’.
Way of looking, this origin got my interest because it matches my primary idea that advice is different from one to another depending on traditions, background and knowledge. It is a way of looking at an opinion according to specific circumstances and time frames.
“Just because you’re right doesn’t mean I’m wrong, you just haven’t seen life from my position.” unknown
I found the contradiction in most of the topics I went around. For instance, constraints boost creativity as well as limit the outcome. So, The only certain thing is the proven history but there is no certainty that a successful story in history can be great now. There is no similar experience that proves a certain future. Each piece of advice cannot be taken for granted because of the variation of time, understanding, beliefs, traditions, background, situation, etc.
Mood Board
The Process
Personality and beliefs are the notions of the idea, so I want to give a sensory effect to the final piece. I found this small size with its delicate pages invites people’s engagement, Moreover, the idea of miniature books has a religious symbol including Christianity and Islam which represent the majority of my target audience. I will start to expose the Egyptian traditions and these people are religious. So, this format could get some attention from them. This format will also encourage people to store it in their wallet or purse with other saints’ pictures, amulets, and memories’ notes.
