Echo: The Stories of Anderson
The Graphic Design program in the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University created an interactive pop-up exhibition showcasing collected written stories of Anderson’s community members.
Echo was an interactive pop-up exhibition in December 2023, in which students taking a special topics course, Design for Social Value, collected stories around the city of Anderson and displayed them for the community to see who all encapsulates this city.
Motivated by the statement, “The neglect of narrative has left the Anderson community separated resulting in an incomplete view of reality and furthering marginalization,” design students challenged themselves and others in the Anderson community to widen their perspectives of who all exists in this intimate city.
The design students were completely devoted to wanting to know more about the city of Anderson, splitting into different design teams to ensure that the show would come together perfectly. During this process, they utilized the Design for America (DFA) design process and methods to collect the stories. Associate Professor Herb Vincent Peterson states that Anderson University is the first and only higher education institution in South Carolina chosen to work with DFA.
The community was encouraged to write their own stories prompted by the question, “How has your journey shaped who you are” during the exhibition. The goal was to display anonymous writings from the community, showcasing that no matter one’s unique story, we are all humans that want to build connections.
Furthermore, the community had a choice to categorize stories they’ve read and place them on an opposite wall with four emotions: joy, fear, sadness, and anger. This was to help the community visualize and understand how the people of Anderson felt as a whole.
Echo is just the beginning of initiatives related to the DFA process and students are looking forward for more projects that connect them to the Anderson community. Future plans are to continue to work with DFA to bring design learning to cross-disciplinary practices to students who are looking into diverse fields in the community.
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