Connection: Raising Awareness in Youth Romantic Relationships
A project to raise awareness on dynamics within youth romantic relationships in a bid to encourage youth to love better
Student: Anoushka Agarwal {BA (Hons) in Communication Design}
Supervising Tutor: Roberto Vilchis Echeverri
Website Link: https://www.buildaconnection.net/
Image 1: Pages from the website to display the illustration style
Image 2: First 3 pages of the website in mobile version
Images 3 & 4: The hue and saturation of illustrations is adjusted to suit the mood of the story. This adds to the atmosphere.
Image 5: ‘Because I care’; Scan through Artivive to watch it come to life
Image 6: ‘Because I care’: Two layered postcard; Tear to reveal message
Image 7: 'Every Breath You Take’: Scan through Artivive to watch it come to life
Image 8: ‘Every Breath You Take’: Two layered postcard; Tear to reveal message
Image 9: ‘A Sweet for My Sweet’: Scan through Artivive to watch it come to life
Image 10: ‘He Loves Me (Not)’: Scan through Artivive to watch it come to life
The Discovery
‘Connection’ is a project to raise awareness on dynamics within youth romantic relationships, focusing on behaviours & conflicts between partners. It attempts to encourage youth, aged between 14-25 years, to love better, as research identified that unhealthy, or abusive relationship behaviours persist among them. This has severe psychological, physical and emotional implications, and the patterns formed during these delicate years continue into adulthood. Educating youth on healthy relationship dynamics could hence assist in development of true love and also self.
Raising awareness through an interactive method that would appeal to youth and subtly guide them towards self reflection became the aim. This reflection is encouraged through exposing visitors to conflicts and communication errors in relationships. The universality of this project adds to its value because loving better and treating others with respect and kindness can be applied to all relationships in life.
The Design Solution
There are three components to this project: interactive web-based game, postcards & stickers. The website would enable visitors to live out stories of relationships based on true experiences of their peers. Their decisions would determine the outcome of their relationship. It allows the visitors to experience the ups and pitfalls in relationships, without implicating themselves or their partners in reality. To avoid linearity, there are interactions through links to external websites, studies, reports & diary entries from their peers’ for perspective.
Since love has been misinterpreted in relationships, the post cards will show a warped concept of this ‘love’ as well. There are two ways to interact with the postcard. One way is to scan it with the Artivive app. The other method involves tearing away the top layer of the postcard to reveal the more sinister message. The stickers can be scanned through Artivive as well to trigger the true message.
