For our campaign, me and Dec looked at the shopping experience and how that can be very daunting & overwhelming for a neodivergent person.
After being set the brief and having it mind, whilst we were at the co-op getting our lunch, we realised how many lights, how much noise, and overall the overstimulating environment of the shop, especially the self-service tills. We came back and did some research and found out that some shops do "quiet times" where the music in the shop is turned off and lights are dimmed.
We thought this was an amazing thing so we decided to base our campaign around this and advocate for these "quiet times" to be put in place in all large retailers worldwide.
We decided to get some ideas on how our campaign would look/feel, so that we could have a better idea of how we could include a new technology as part of our campaign.
We designed these posters as part of our campign, which would be widely distributed digitally and physically, using blues ( a soothing colour for neodivergents ) as a main colour. We illustrated the overstimulation of shopping in these posters, whilst also keeping them calm enough for neodivergents.
When thinking about innovative technologies, we thought about doing an interactive experience, based around the overstimulation of the shopping experience for neodivergents. Our experience would be two rooms, one simulating what it is like to shop through the view of a neodivergent person, and the other, the "quiet time" shopping experience. This would be to make people realise the effect it has on neodivergents when doing something as simple as shopping.
People would experience lots of noise, bright lights, and lost of colours in the "normal" shopping experience, hopefully making them feel overwhelmed, then walk into the next room where everything would be calm and a nice, peacefull shopping experience.
This interactive instalation would be put in the middle of large cities, attracting alot of attention, and spreading alot of awareness.
The video above attemps to replicate what it is like to go shopping with Autism, one of the brances included in the term "neodivergent" to hopefully show whhy this instillation would be beneficial in spreading awareness to the general public.
