Joy is motivated by projects which enable marginalized communities through visual design. Her ambitious practice incorporates experimental film to narrow the distance between the public and maginalised peoples through design education with experimentation as a central theme.
Incorporating experimental cinematic techniques, this project seeks to effectively convey information and emotion, helping improve Chinese citizens’ empathy for autistic women. The campaign promotes social support and acceptance for this group. Utilising video, the audience intuitively senses the inner world and expressive changes of autistic women through visual presentation, helping achieve emotional understanding. China’s Generation Z is the intended audience and their connection to digital communities will be important for dissemination.
Reducing loneliness and better integrating these autistic women into society is the scheme’s intention, helping improve their mental health.
In the ‘Interdisciplinary Projects’ module of the second semester of my Master’s programme at Loughborough University, I worked with students with autism at Homefield College. Their social behaviour and emotional responses were observed to ensure my project’s validity, accuracy and applicability for theoretical analysis of autistic patients. Throughout the observation process, I have been playing the role of a bystander, an informal and indirect practice process.
To protect the privacy of autistic students, the faces and names in the photos are those of Loughborough University MA students, not the students from Homefiled College.
The project is presented in the form of a first-perspective experimental film. When the audience watches the film, they will be asked if it was a success or if it inspired them.
There are three possibilities: ‘No’, ‘A little bit’ and ‘Yes’; For different answers, the audience gets different coloured badges.
