Volunteers are needed for a fun and uplifting social project!  Simone Elliot, a third year Visual Communication and Media Design student is looking for people of all backgrounds to be the subjects of a fun experiment, which will be later transformed into a design as part of her Creative Research project.

Simone is looking for volunteers to ask their loved ones, family and friends to think of one characteristic they like about the volunteer, which defines them as a unique individual. Then they simply have to send that one-word characteristic to Simone via SMS.

Once all the characteristics are received, representations of the volunteers will be made by Simone.  Volunteers will be asked to view the representations and take part in a short interview to see if the praising characteristics make them feel better or happier about themselves.

Simon’s project has been inspired by other social projects like ‘an experiment in gratitude’, video here. Which shows that expressing gratitude can improve happiness.

Simone has previously run the ‘Spread a Smile’ project where she left three bears around Dundee; two in the train station and one in the bus station. A note was left around each bears neck to invite people to take the bear with them and see how far it could go, encouraging people to email photos of the bears journey.  This project saw the bears travelling as far as Musselburgh and Penzance!

The purpose was to see how willing people are to take part in something conducted by someone they don’t know and was also to try and brighten a day which would usually be quite dull – travelling on a bus or train.  Also out of pure curiosity to see how far the bears could actually go with input from the public.

If you would like to take part in this project, then simply just send your name to this email address:  1202555@live.abertay.ac.uk and Simone will be in touch.

Hopefully when volunteers get to see their ‘representation’ of themselves in a few weeks, it will be worth harassing your loved ones, as you will feel great after seeing all the amazing characteristics people love the most about you!  So join in and get ready to cringe at all the nice things you’re going to hear about yourself!