VISUALISATION

I am a part of a small yet developing project about Russian culture that is called  ‘kesyov’ ( ‘our’ — in Russian). To share our research and projects with the society we  use different social media: such as Instagram, Telegram (popular web-channel   for sharing your thoughts and ideas in Russia), Facebook etc.    In order to widen our audience coverage we decided to create our own website  and that was the point when the big challenge appeared: How exactly will it  look like and why? What will be the graphics like? What will be the tone of voice  with which the website talks to a customer? How can we become closer to oua  audience etc).   After a session of brainstorming we realized that to create a ‘Russian’ website we  need to understand what ‘Russia’ is in terms of words, tags, pictures, drawings,  images and so on. However, our team is very small (only 3 people work on this  project), which means that just our personal answers to those questions will  be not enough to create an exact common image that is required.  To achieve the best result that is possible we’ve decided to ask our viewers  (potential and existing) to actually visualise ‘What is Russia?’ in their opinion. So  we will be able to analyse this data and create something that is based on the  general statistics. We did this little game-challenge at the one of our free-en- trance exhibition. We created a ‘drawing corner’ with the necessary materials  such as sheets of paper with the text of the task (‘what is Russia in your opinion?  1) Draw 2) Write 3) Visualise however you want), markers and special tape to  make sure that after people have completed the task they can share it by placing  their work on the wall, so other people (and our project team) can look at it and  analyze it.

(01)  CHALLENGE & SELECTION

(02)  APPLICATION

As I said before, we played this game with our viewers at our exhibition  which was located in the library. There we showed our works which were rus- sian-themed posters, paintings and videos about our local regions features. People came there, looked at some masterpieces which were presented and  than listened to a presentation about “kesyov”, where we spoke about who we are,  what we do and what is our main goal. This presentation included some inter- action with the audience, so after it was done viewers began to feel much more  comfortable on this event. In our presentation we also mentitioned this ‘game’  that we biult up, to make sure that the most of our visitors will take part in it.   During the exhibition people were constantly coming to that drawing corner  and expressing their thoughts and ideas about the topic. When ‘kesyov’ exhibition  was officially over, we took all paper sheets off the wall and started analysing it.

(03)  INSIGHT

(04)  APPROACH

Ahmed Maprok

The way people depicted their subjective images of Russia was remarkably  diverse. However, we were managed to identify particular common tendencies.  Firstly, among other colours, red and grey were prevailing. Most frequently red  was associated with Red Square in Moscow, national costumes, and war, while  grey was about dullness of Russian cities. Secondly, visitors who expressed their  feelings about Russia in a verbal form tended to use non-official vocabulary. For  example, local jokes, personal conversations fragments or popular quotes from  Russian movies. These observations lead us to the insight: in order to become  closer to our audience, we should, metaphorically speaking, give them the floor,   hear them and than be able to speak the same language. For instance,  for the  basis of our website we will use red and grey colours and a friendly, informal  tone of voice.

As for the graphic decisions, the great diversity of visitors’ answers didn’t let us  come to the choice of a certain visual language. This made us conclude that the  next design tool that we should use is ‘Mind Mapping Tool’ which will help us to  classify data better and come up with some new beneficial insights.

