Little Lady Designer: Studio Journal - 24 Hour Narrative: The Power of Emoticons

In Design III-A we were given our first official project, the 24 Hour Narrative. The parameters were that we had to document 'something' over the passage of time through whatever means necessary.

Trying to dance within the realms of my overarching thesis focus: The construction of Self, I came up with the idea of documenting the sending and receiving of emoticons via text messaging.

My plan for the 24 Hour Narrative was to see how many emoticons could I collect in a day. Observing their trends and patterns, the reaction of myself and my contacts to the changing stream if conversation and the represented emotions. Through the 24 hour period I have to say I received mostly "smiley face" emotions. If there were any cases of a negative emoticon, such as a sad or angry face, it was met with either a similar, understanding emoticon, or attempted to be uplifted by a loving, caring one.

The really cool part is, that not only was I documenting the conversation of emoticons that day, but in a sense I was documenting a vast part, or parts, of myself. Conversations touched on what I did that day, that moment, how life has been, how friends have been, so on and so forth. It painted a typography picture of my 'self' and even some of my friends and family too.

A big part of self identity comes from who we interact with. Now that most of our interaction comes from an electronic screen at our fingertips, our days can be shaped and our internal and external reactions triggered by an creative arrangement of characters and glyphs we've come to know as emoticons. There is something very emotion about these emoticons (no pun intended) but it's almost a necessity that we need clear proof of how our friends are feeling. The absence of emoticons from a text tends to leave the receiver feeling an uneasy seriousness or disconnectedness from the contact.

Now, how this all comes to something as deep as shaping the self is simple as cause and effect. One person sends an emoticon and thus gets one in return. It is gratifying to see the reminiscence of facial features, we respond to the fact that our friends and family are happy, sad or angry (and every other emotion under the sun depending on how creative you are with you handling of characters.) It's a new way of face-to-face interaction, depending on your emotional level it can get very personal and truly affect your 'self'.