#CMUbeautiful

A speculative design project with Michal Luria and Kate Martin.

Taking a midday stroll through campus, it’s not unusual to hear students joking about how many units they’re taking this semester or how little sleep they got last night. The manifestations of these choices—under-eye bags, poor hygiene, drowsiness, drooping eyes, delirium—are worn with pride amongst the student body. They are shows of passion, dedication and drive.

Expressions of pride in work are not new. In fact, they may take root in the foundations of this university, following in the footsteps of a man who proclaimed “My heart is in work.” However, whether it’s tradition or peer pressure, there is no justification for not taking care of oneself both physically and emotionally. CMU has tried in recent years to revamp its mental health initiatives, yet this sadistic culture remains present in every corner of the university.

We wanted to make people conscious of the ways they treat themselves without being accusatory or didactic. We hoped to poke fun at our culture in an effort to encourage individuals to reconsider their conformity with it. We considered many forms this “intervention” might take, from kiosks to performances and products to signage. Eventually, we settled on designing a makeup station to place in a few men’s and women’s bathrooms on campus that satirically reinforces the competitive pride felt for overworking oneself.

We position a set of five products as everything you need to epitomize beauty at CMU (#CMUbeautiful) and show off to your friends how hard you worked last night *wink wink.* These products include:

• B.O. Cologne scent after-hours, not after shower
• Rosy Gaze radiant, red eyes and weary tears
• Sleepless Beauty easy, breezy under-eye bags
• Drowsy Drops it’s the feeling, not the look
• Messy Nest bad hair day, everyday

We knew that one of the drawbacks of placing these products in bathrooms is that there’s little to no way of assessing feedback for privacy reasons. Luckily enough, someone (as a complete surprise to us), posted a photo of this on Overheard at Carnegie Mellon, a Facebook group comprising of amusing CMU content.

It’s obvious that people enjoy this, but it’s still unclear whether everyone understands the satirical context (of CMU culture as opposed to CS student hygiene) and yet even more uncertain whether this affected anyone on a deeper level. At best, this appears to have been an amusing project which many students identify with (as manifest by the enormous number of likes) but which hits no nerves and facilitates no thought.

Before we made this, I knew the project would have no legs to support itself, no source of heat to light a fire. However, I was still curious to see how people would react, hoping that maybe a single person would leave a thoughtful post-it note in the mirror, responding to our assertions and critique. In many ways, this project represents a classical SCD approach, which I have never myself implemented, but was curious to try out.

At one point, I considered leaving a note myself (under a pseudonym) bashing the “creators” of this intervention, accusing them of sitting idly by while students around the university suffer from mental illness that goes unnoticed and uncared for. I thought the juxtaposition of a curated, privileged satire to a raw, heartfelt and handwritten note might be sufficient to draw people in and give a second thought their contributions to this culture. However, I never posted this because the next morning, the tray and poster were removed, replaced with these vinyl stickers in the bathroom:

This corporate propaganda was obviously not put up in response to our intervention, but it’s a coincidence that cannot go unnoticed. Juxtaposing our attempts and the university’s attempts to enliven campus culture makes me wonder:

• Which is more inspiring?
• Which creates more discussion?
• Which reinforces the status quo?
• Which is more engaging?
• Which makes you feel more depressed?

To a large extent, I believe the perceived creators of an intervention determine the extent to which an individual gives credence to a proposal. The interventions introduced by the school feel large, imposing, clean, bombastic, in-your-face, aggressive, didactic, instructional and invasive. If they were smaller in scale, placed in less-invasive locations, and exemplified a hand-made aesthetic (more attributable to a group of students than bureaucracy), I believe they would be given more attention, regardless of what they actually said. The content of an intervention doesn’t feel like it affects the willingness of students to engage with it.

Sustained engagement, however, does depend on content. Our intervention feels like it received, to a degree, sustained engagement, but not the kind of deep-rooted questioning, reactionary engagement we hoped for. Were we too polite or too proper or too impersonal?

Embodying our message in objects without a sense of agency is the likely culprit of failure, in my eyes. It’s easy to stare at these; they don’t beg to be held, coddled or ripped apart. They are static sculptures, devoid of context and out of mind. I’m still not sure how we might be more successful next time if pursuing a similar SCD methodology. Perhaps a more effective alternative would be to allow others to be drawn to our personal work and research (with a face), instead of namelessly seeking out and forcing upon others unwanted visual debris.

Note: We considered working in the city of Pittsburgh (instead of on-campus), but realized that our efforts would likely feel meaningless to ‘burghers, coming from a place of such privilege. So, we decided to embrace that we live within a bubble and try to help those communities that we engage with on a regular basis—the communities that we know, that we feel ourselves part of (but maybe not proud of).