How to Read Trump

Description

Trump is a typical New Yorker. He's been using hand gestures all the time while he is talking, and that became one of his personal icon known by people. BBC even made a video about what he means by his different hand gestures:

This project is about make a logic or a way to "hide" the secret words. I decided to make it more like a "read the graphic and guessing the meaning" form. I think Trump's facial expression and hand gestures are a perfect match for it.

Design Process

It is very clear that the context matter in my project is the relationships between the facial expression and hand gestures of Trump. The sender is himself, and in this case I use his pictures I collected from the internet. The audience are the ones who play with my deasign to guess.

I first exxtracted a few of his exaggerating facial exxpression and only cut out the face part. Then I cut out the related hand gesture graphics too and made 2 boards for each of these collection. My idea is to make it like a card game which could be "flipped over" to see the connections.

The idea is further developed to a form of wheel game. The "square wheel" have 4 of the sections. The audience would first see the facial of Trump and could click on the one they would like to know to "flip over" the section to see the hand gesture behind the face.

Reflection

I saw that a lot of other people are making a design which could hide their words by color or texxture changing, or inventing a new language logic to the audience. I would say that I made something straightforward to read but has more interactive parts to play with.

The idea of anti-survilliance is very crucial in today's world because the internet and AI have invaded into our life. We have no privacies or abilities to hide away from the internet, and we are all transparent. I still remember that when I was a kid I always play some games which we invent or own graphic words to talk to each others about our secret, but since when I don't care about "secrets" any more? I think been in an environment where eberyone is exposed would create a world of mobs. The idea of designing an "anti-survilliance" tool is thus very important. It is also a good exercise for designers to make some "tricks" in this design.

Reference

Trump's Hand Gestures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p7sOsDHLiw&list=PLnFHt2tDDNST7eMmemCMrlIarNv593vN0&index=4