I thought today was one of the weirdest days at Uni so far. We had two A1 sheets of orange paper and we had to create something with them in groups of 4/5, in order to try and get as much public interaction as possible. I say it was weird because we were just sent out into the world and left to our own devices to produce something that could really capture peoples attention, and it created a strange dynamic. 

My group was all boys so the day was enjoyable, we had a lot of laughs with the project. After brainstorming some initial ideas, we ended up with the idea of trying to make people stop in their tracks and 'take a break'. We proceeded to write in bold, "Life moves fast, take a break" on one sheet, and on the other drew two footprints for people to stand on.  

I liked the idea and thought it definitely had potential to garner some attention, however I did raise the point that it would just be another sign for people to walk past in all the commotion of London, and could be at risk of not working at all. That said, we moved forward as a group, which I was happy to do, and went to Southbank so we could position the sheets over the River Thames, to give people a nice view if they chose to 'take a break'. 

 

As you can see there are a lack of photos here that show that there was any interaction with what we did. This is because there was barely anyone who interacted properly with it, instead I saw a lot of people either glance at the piece and carry on walking as if nothing happened, or breeze past and take a photo of it. The group collectively saw it as a failure and 'pointless', however after some thought I think it actually was more successful than if we had got interaction in terms of how I can learn from it. 

I see the lack of interaction as a vague societal commentary, as it highlighted the irony that I feel a lot of society lives in; people would take photos of it, after stopping for just two seconds, and undoubtedly a lot of them would have posted it on their social media profiles. These people clearly had some sort of interest otherwise they wouldn't have acknowledged it at all. However, they didn't actually take a break from what they were doing, completely contradicting what they had more than likely displayed to the world as a message. 

It's a really interesting outcome to an interesting day, and even if the point I'm making is based on assumption, the fact that this activity led to me thinking this in the first place highlights the success of the day.