Defeat the Awkwardness
It's been 18 months since our last class at OCAD; reentering the physical space can be Awkward... so the problem we face is how do we create something to help us reconnect and navigate offline school. "Leave every room with a smile" This is the main idea that has driven our strategy. We aim to ease the transition to in-person learning by playing with satirical humour and creating social scripts and spaces to escape to for a moment to yourself.
One element of the campaign was to create a simple system to let peers and professors know how you feel without saying anything because that can be awkward. Thus the lanyard system was born. As part of the reopening plan, all students were required to carry their student IDs to move in and out of buildings. Lanyards with cardholders make our cards easier to access and create an opportunity for a colour coding system to indicate our comfort level in social interactions for the day. The three colours, yellow, pink, and orange, each represent a different comfort level. Each student will receive the three lanyards in their survival tote (the colouring book above is also in the survival tote.) As a guide to the lanyard system, we designed posters to go up around campus for the students and small booklets for the professors.
This was created in partnership with Rita Tsetsekas and Ariel Roh
** everything shown was my contribution to the campaign