DESIGN TOOL -VISUALISATION

CHALLENGE AND SELECTION  Being a high schooler in India, I realised that none of the schools that I was acquainted  with, included sex education as a part of their curriculum. The thought that millions of  children in my country were unequipped with the knowledge of which situations they had  to be alert in, and which behaviours or actions were considered assault, came as a shock  to me. Therefore, to educate the students in my school, about sexual assault and self  defence through our school’s “SCREAM NO” campaign, my friends and I selected the  tool of visualisation as our core medium. Our use of visualisation corresponded  appropriately with our purpose to demonstrate to the children, the scenarios and actions  that they had to be made aware of, through our theatrical plays and movies.

APPLICATION  Our “SCREAM NO” campaign was created to emphasise to the students of the age 6 to  12 years’, about the diﬀerence between “GOOD touch” and “BAD touch”. We branched  out our medium of visualisation into three forms— enacting plays, showcasing compiled  scenes from movies and demonstrating self-defence moves.  We began the ﬁrst stage of the campaign where all volunteers would enact situations in  which the child would be able to distinguish if a stranger or an acquaintance of theirs,  was touching them inappropriately; and then, act out the possible manners in which they  could respond or react to those actions, one of them attributing to the title itself,  screaming “NO”. Our second stage, was our cinematic session, where we compiled various clips from  movies to showcase certain behaviours and dialogues that could foreshadow assault. To  broaden their awareness on assault and mutual safety; we made sure they were also  shown scenes where we could debunk actions that were normalised and parodied in  ﬁlms. We explained how the concept of eve-teasing people on the streets was neither  normal, nor encouraged, and how the reactions displayed on screen weren’t  correspondent to reality. Lastly, we taught them some self defence tricks and moves, so that they were physically  capable of protecting themselves in dangerous situations. We then enacted situations  where the volunteers were pretending to be assaulters, so the students could perform  and practice the moves they learnt.

INSIGHT AND APPROACH  We held our campaign over a period of three months, and the results were extraordinary.  We asked the students, after each stage in the entire course of the program, if what we  presented to them was useful or enlightening in any manner. Their responses made my  day. They stated that the plays and movies we showed them, were not only more  entertaining and involving, but they also connected signiﬁcantly more to the visual  aspects of our program than the theoretical parts of it.  Using this approach of visualisation assured that the students and the volunteers were on  the same page at each stage of the campaign, and helped make the concepts of self  defence and the dangers of sexual assault, physically tangible. The students understood  which behaviours they shouldn’t encourage or normalise and what they should stand for  as individuals.  Through this campaign, I truly saw the impact that visualisation can have on the eﬃciency  of our communication skills, and the increment in our potential to be more persuasive.

