For the assignment 1, we were asked to snoop somebody else’s room!
We had a small assignment for the Christmas holiday to collect some childhood photographs of the room where we grew up. For snooping, the rooms of the photographs were supposed to be surrounded by stuff such as posters on the wall, friends, clothes or so.
Since I did not go back to Japan during the holiday, I asked my parents to scan and send me those photographs by email. Actually I did not remember those photographs of my house so I was happy to see and remember my old times.
For this semester 2, I was put in to group 6. It was, again, a mixed group of students from different design discipline.
Firstly, we gathered to snoop the photographs of people in the group 5. We had to say and take note honestly what we thought even though it was messy or dirty. Followings are what I jotted down by snooping.
Person 1
Snooping:
messy but organized room – especially around the desk is an organized mess
maybe female
doesn’t like cooking, lots of plastic bags – TESCO and LIDL
a sewing machine – doing textile design
likes reading – many books, technical books (?) and a typewriter – mature or not a teenager
a sense of responsibility to keep plants
bad eyes – contact lenses
smoker – an ash tray
Answer and response:
SHE is a JEWELLERY design student (not a male textile student), a smoker, and a florist, likes reading, and uses contact lenses. The result of our snooping was almost correct but she seemed embarrassed by our comment “messy” but I liked that kind of organized mess.
Person 2
Snooping:
lots of DVDs in neat arrangement on the shelf
definitely male – dark colours – everything is just black and grey
cares about looking / proud of himself – a big stand mirror
IED student(?) – chair painted in bluish colours, a camera
Clean and tidy – almost nothing more than DVDs, games, and a camera
lives in basement(?) – white block wall without windows
no posters on the wall
Answer and response:
Those were almost correct. He seemed surprised, and said our comments were not much about his personality. He did not think he cared much about his looking. I cannot say he definitely cares about his looking only for a reason of a big mirror, but I think a few male has a big mirror in their room.
Person 3
Snooping:
male, happy childhood – big smile wearing a yellow jumper
likes playing outside with brother, sister, cousins or friends
likes imagination – climbing trees and play pirates
Answer and response:
Those were correct. He did not think he liked imagination. Actually it was quite difficult to snoop from those pictures of outside. But it was true he was a happy boy!
Person 4
Snooping:
female, older than 20 – old photographs, mum and a brother – very close to her mum,
wearing glasses, holiday to see families – somewhere sunny place not Scotland(?)
blonde, British / Scottish, bridesmaid in a white dress
had Santa Claus in the house!
Answer and response:
The result of our snooping was almost correct. She is a Scottish and Jewellery design student, but she does not wear glasses now. She agreed that she was very close to her mother. She seemed happy with our snooping.
Person 5
Snooping:
has a brother or sister of almost same age of this person
definitely female, blonde girl,
90’s taste (?), big family, dressed colourful
classy and girlish taste – ribbon on her hair
very clean and tidy room, old English style room, nice bedroom, lots of make-up stuff, drinking vodka during make-up (!?) – a bottle of vodka on a dresser
flower pattern wall paper, no posters on the wall, plays electric guitar
dog person – 4 dog photos on the wall
Jewellery or textile student – accessories on a mannequin
Answer and response:
Those were almost correct. She is a Textile student, and she likes dogs. The wallpaper or classy atmosphere of the rooms is her mother’s taste. She seemed happy with our result of snooping such as very tidy rooms but she said she was not a regular vodka drinker ( ! ).
Then, I move to the comments of snooping of my photographs by group 5.
Actually those are not my bedroom photographs but taken in a living room of my parents’ house in Japan.
The group 5 people said, I was a female, Japanese and older than 25. There were dates on some photographs when those were taken so probably it helped to guess my age bracket. Yes I am Japanese as they thought, and there were some Japanese books in the photographs. Other things they said were; lots of things in a small space, lots of old VHS videos on the shelf, academic / intellectual family, big family, many ornaments and decorations in a cupboard, likes arts and crafts. Yes I am definitely older than 25 female, and Japanese. I have parents and a younger brother – but not from a big family. From their analysis, I learn about myself as I grew up in a kind of academic or creative environment. I did not think that much but my father is a professor, in his room there’re loads of books (seriously fear of earthquake ! ) and I am very close to my father so maybe I grew up in a kind of academic atmosphere. My mother studied textile design at an art university and is a jeweller in Japan. She was / is very strict about everything – manners or learning art related things. My brother and I were often strictly “forced” to do some those art related things such as piano, drawing, sewing or so. In fact, I hated doing those but my brother probably enjoyed those things and he was playing piano and drawing much better than me. Now he works at Toshiba in Tokyo as a programmer (I am not sure if it is related to art and craft ! ).
Throughout this workshop, of-course I thought the atmospheres of the British rooms were very different from mine. The most interesting point for me was, the sizes of rooms. The taste or clothes that people wore would be also interesting but I was interested in the size.
As is well known, Japanese houses are quite small and people live in close quarters. The reason why is maybe we have a lot of mountains or lakes and do not have much space for living in those small islands. I found some figures compared Japan with Britain. I could know interesting fact.
The land of Japan is bigger than of the UK but Japan has more than double the population of the UK. And also the ratios of habitable area are very different. The ratio of Japanese habitable area is 33.6%, and the UK’s habitable area is 88.4%. That is why Japanese people live in very small houses. This is not because of our small bodies!
And from this fact I also thought that people in the UK or US would not care much about spaces or ecological issues because they could use the land generously – this is just my opinion that is not based on any research. That atmosphere would allow people to do something in a big scale – make a big painting, eat a huge meal, build a big house with a swimming pool, own a big car, have a huge dumping site, etc.
In Japan, basically houses are small, and people are small, accordingly we have to live in a limited space, we eat a small meal (maybe), we wear small size of clothes, we have a big problem of limited dumping places so we always think about the solution to reduce garbage.
And obviously after having the big earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plants’ matter last year, we are limited many things more than before. We strictly have to save using electricity individually. Many people evacuated from Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi to the other prefectures, that would change the ratio of habitable area.
This workshop brought me a lot of things to think. Not only identical things, but also something else.
Simply I thought a lot of people in th UK grew up in a big space. I think a sense of distance or space could influence people in some ways. This is really a vague idea but I strongly thought I should have this difference about the size of space in my mind when I design something.
coyosa design 