Not the best of pictures, but it was taken by my good friends who deigned to make the perilous trudge up the never-ending stairs to the exhibition venue at Old School, Mount Sophia — which to me really sums up what this exhibition was about. Yes, there were potential bosses to impress; clients to meet; agencies to leave name cards with, but as I climbed those stairs with a different group of friends for the sixth time last week, I realised that this exhibition, to me, was really about showing my loved ones what I did and have been doing in uni these 4 years.

It felt good to finally let them see why I could hardly meet up with any of them for the past year or so, or why I always complain of being busy, tired and swamped with work. It felt good to show them that designers don’t just “draw some stuff” for their projects and hand them in. But most of all, it felt the best to just share with them the fruits of a hard year’s work — many of whom contributed to its success in varying degrees.

So with a new definition of FYP and a fresh graduate cert in hand, we are all off to whatever is next in life. But I’m grateful for the  ADM Grad Show 2010 because it not only left me with more toned calves, but great memories.

Phew, when I think of all the thought, work, time, headaches, midnight snacks that have gone into what should more or less be the final product of FYP tomorrow morning, it just seems unreal. And possibly slightly inadequate. Hmm. We’ll see tomorrow. I’m really hoping the critics won’t be too, er, critical.

Okay, to bed and then to the most important day of my uni life.

A little glimpse at where I’m at now. I really love the tactile graphics; now the issue is how to translate them into something that really reflects my research, thoughts and concepts about wishing, instead of just pretty images that don’t say anything else. Right now my idea is to merge the above style and feel to the information graphics I’ve done previously (see below), and possibly gravitate towards the concept of a “wishing guide”, or info book.

Book?! Hmm, I don’t know… We’ll see.

⁵ At Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream, and God said, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you.” ⁶ Solomon answered, “You have shown great kindness to your servant, my father David, because he was faithful to you and righteous and upright in heart. You have continued this great kindness to him and have given him a son to sit on his throne this very day. ⁷ “Now, O LORD my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. ⁸ Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. ⁹ So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?” ¹⁰ The Lord was pleased that Solomon had asked for this. ¹¹ So God said to him, “Since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have asked for the death of your enemies but for discernment in administering justice, ¹² I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. ¹³ Moreover, I will give you what you have not asked for—both riches and honor—so that in your lifetime you will have no equal among kings. ¹⁴ And if you walk in my ways and obey my statutes and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life.” (taken from 1 Kings 3:5-14)

If I were to summarize and perhaps, if I may, slightly paraphrase the passage, God tells King Solomon: Wish for anything and I will fulfill it. And Solomon asks for wisdom to rule his kingdom, instead of long life, riches or even death for his enemies. Its sort of like a genie asking what your wish is—I’m not saying God is like a genie that grants wishes, but in this case the circumstances are similar as one is being ask for his or her wish in certainty that it will come true.

This is, of course, compared to most of the time where we make wishes without the knowledge or certainty that they will be fulfilled. Does that change things? I’m not sure, but I do know that wishes inevitably contain a certain amount of uncertainty in fulfillment—or possibility, as I have endlessly mentioned—and it is this possibility of fulfillment or failure that makes it so captivating to the imagination.

And now… I’m exploring how to encourage working towards this possibility of fulfillment!

Argh how did I miss this? Thats what you get for not reading newspapers and not venturing into the general “town” area for fear of encountering the Christmas crowds, I suppose.

Either way, this event/project pertains so much to my project that I can hardly ignore it, even though its over and done with. If you, like me, haven’t heard about it until now, its basically a side event for the Marina Bay 2010 Countdown whereby people are asked to write their wishes (and dreams, aspirations, hopes etc.) onto large white spheres (euphemism for beach balls) and all these wishes—all 20,000 of them, I hear—are then floated onto the Singapore River. Kind of reminiscent of Thailand’s Loy Krathong, no?

Anyway, the scale of the project itself is pretty awe-inspiring and the images are simply amazing. You really can’t beat 20,000 white spheres floating on the river with the city skyline as a backdrop; couple that with the fact that these spheres are actually covered with the wishes of thousands of Singaporeans, and it really makes for quite a poignant scene.

From the official Marina Bay Countdown website, they have information on the significance of the wishing spheres, and also a gallery where people can submit their wishes in the form of videos, photos or text online. Also, there’s a short clip on Youtube by mrbrown, where he tracks the journey of a sphere!

Great as all this may be, I still have to ask myself one important question—what about me? Whats so special about my project that is different from all the others out there, or has something new to offer? From all the research I’ve done, I know that I don’t simply want a project that is a collection of wishes—anyone can and has done that—I want to use the conclusions I’ve come up with, the categories of wishes I’ve devised, to do something deeper, something different. To be honest, and this might be a little scary, but I still don’t know. Trust me, I’ve spent the entire break thinking about it, but there just isn’t that one idea that makes the imaginary light bulb above my head light up.

But it’ll get there somehow, I have to believe it. It just needs more exploration and time. My project is like a wish; now, will it come true?

Been taking a break from FYP and all until exams and submissions are over, but nowadays I can’t seem to come across the word “wish” without having my heart jump a little faster (out of fear or excitement, you decide). Anyway, with Christmas just around the corner, the word seems to appear just about everywhere; so I decided to post the Starbucks one that I’ve seen recently. They have a campaign of sorts called ‘Make A Wish‘, whereby customers can choose from a few items to be donated to the residents of Gracehaven, which I assume is a charity organisation or home. Hardly an entire novel concept, but quite in line with the spirit of “Christmas”, nonetheless!

Til next time, be jolly and all that.

My 22nd birthday just passed a couple of days ago; perhaps rather ironically, I didn’t have a birthday cake this year and hence forfeited my annual birthday wish, if one were to believe the superstitions. Actually, that didn’t stop me from making a very fanciful wish of having Manchester United beat Chelsea (the match was played at exactly midnight on my birthday)—one which, as expected, did not come true. I must say my hopes weren’t high, because last year I made the same “wish” for the Man Utd v Arsenal game, and you can guess how that went. Also, the lack of a cake (and the subsequent blowing of candles etc.) was hardly an encouraging sign.

As you can tell, I had a rather nondescript and uneventful birthday—spent most of it at home doing assignments and writing up a thesis draft about the very birthday cakes I should be cutting. Ah yes, the thesis draft. Sigh, where to begin…

I’ve done the research, I’ve come up with a conclusion, but somehow the project seems to be lacking something. I need a direction, an aim and a purpose (yes, I realise they’re all synonyms). Now that I know all this, where do I want to bring it? What do I want people/myself to know? How does this information help anyone? What, really, is the point of all this?

Well I like making lists to organise my thoughts so here’s a list of important points in my research:
• Wishes are aims that are constrained by the limits of the real world
• Wishes are an invitation for people to engage in fantasy
• It is not so much the contents of wishes that is desired, but the possibility of them coming true
• Possibility is exciting because of its unknown, unpredictable nature
• Different types of wishes: tangible, abstract, impossible, altruistic etc.
• Different levels of wishes (related to intensity of wishes – how strongly desired a wish is)
• Different attitudes of people regarding wishes: highly superstitious, pragmatic, practical?
• Lack of hope stems from one’s perceived inability to fulfill one’s wishes
• Making wishes (with rituals/superstitions in particular) allows the “odds” of the wish coming true to be based on something “greater” than the individual

Possible pitfalls:
• Dissatisfied nature associated with wishing – always wanting something more, not content with the present?
• Giving false hope – encouraging people to look at “possibilities” when they are not there?
• Too much “action” (becoming goals instead of wishes?) versus inducing inaction (leaving everything to “fate”?)

Possible directions:
• To show wishing as an individual act, yet as a collective human tendency
- Aims to remove the dissatisfied aspect of wishing by showing that we are not alone in wishing, and also that we may in fact be “living out” someone else’s wishes (ie. someone wishes they could get a good university education)
- Possible solution: Infographics mapping different wishes. Problem: needs large participation, possibly even from other countries and also, will be mostly limited to tangible wishes
• To encourage the imagination of possibilities
- Aims to provide hope and expectation of wish-fulfillment, not to make wishes come true but to put out the possibility that they will, and encouraging people to engage their imagination
- There will have to be a divide between possible and impossible wishes and how each must be thought of and handled differently
- Possible problems: giving false hope and unrealistic expectations, maintaining a balance between the rational and fantasy

Ohkay, that didn’t help much, I’m just finding it really hard to find something that I want to take out of this topic. Need to dig deeperrrrrrrr. Argh!

I really can’t wait for this sem to be over!

So anyway, after much brain-racking and endless cups of Ribena, here’s how I would sum up my project:

Wishing is a collective yet individual human tendency that springs from inciting possibility—whereby the contents of wishes themselves are not so much desired as the possibility of them being fulfilled. This “possibility” depends very much on the balance between (usually) unsubstantiated belief and anticipation, and rational action taken—the former leading into the realm of superstition and magical thinking, and the latter very much taking the form of goals or aims.

Okay, I see you scratching your head over there. So, to further illustrate, here’s an, uh, illustration:

Every wish each person has is like a seed. If nothing is done to it, it remains just that; a seed, or a mental desire in our head. However, we all know that what’s great and exciting about a seed is that it has the possibility of becoming a tree, with leaves, fruit, flowers and so on. (Hence the low opacity on the tree, if you noticed, because its only an imagined state.) This tree, in my little analogy, would be equal to the possibility of a fulfilled wish (or wishes).

In order for the seed to grow and fulfill its possibility, however, it relies on two elements—nature and nurture (for lack of better terms). Nature would involve sunlight, rain and other natural elements that are essential for the seed to grow, and this would be my metaphor for “belief”, superstition, anticipation, hope, and whatever you might call it. Nurture, on the other hand, involves a conscious effort of ploughing the soil, watering the seed, spraying fertilizers etc, which would be the metaphor for “action” or rational, physical steps taken to ensure that the wish comes true.

To complete the analogy, the “type of seed” may differ according to the type of wish one makes (tangible, fantastical etc), and the “type of environment” the seed grows in may differ according to the attitudes and beliefs of the wisher. For example, a ground which already has fertile soil may need little “work” on the part of the grower; and natural elements play a larger part in helping the seed grow. This could be likened to a wisher who is highly superstitious, and believes that simply making a wish and leaving it to “fate” to make it come true is good enough, without taking any further action to fulfill it.

The premise, however, is that there must always be both elements involved, no matter the proportion of each one, in order for the possibility of wish-fulfillment to be present.

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Right! Hope that explanation was clear/helpful/useful? Leave me a comment or feedback to let me know!

Because believe it or not, you can even apply mathematical formulas to the concept of ‘wishing’—in this case, the level of ‘wishedforness’ (preference or intensity of the wish). Taken from the paper Remarks on Wishes and Counterfactuals, Ernest W. Adams:

Theories of preference and decision can be reinterpreted to apply to wishes and preferences among them – ‘degrees of wishedforness’. Consider the following. Let x and y be ‘objects’ among which a person, P, has preferences, and the strengths of these preferences are measured, as usual, by utilities, u(x) and u(y), in such a way that P prefers x to y if and only if u(x) > u(y). Suppose, moreover, that s1,…,sn are logically possible and mutually exclusive ‘possibilities’ whose probabilities, given, say, x, are given by p(s1/x),…,p(sn/x), respectively. Then Richard Jeffrey’s Logic of Decision (Jeffrey, 1983) implies that

(J) u(x) = u(x&s1)(p(s1/x) +…+ u(x&sn)(p(sn/x) .

Now obviously, I didn’t really understand 3/4 of the paper, considering I haven’t exactly touched Math in about 3 years, but I just found it interesting (and, I have to admit, slightly scary) that even a topic so abstract (or so you would think) as ‘wishes’ could be applied to such rigid formulas.

Besides the scary numbers though, this paper does bring up an important aspect: the fact that all wishes are related to conditionals; that is to say, if I say “I wish you would stay”, the reason or condition behind making that wish is that “I wish you would stay so I could show you my toy collection”. Therefore, different conditionals give rise to different levels of “intensity” in wishes. For example, if the conditional was “I wish you would stay because I really need someone to talk to”, then naturally we could assume that the intensity or ‘degree of wishedforness’ would be higher.

Interesting, no? I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around the concept of different “levels” and types of wishes and how to classify them, and I think this idea of intensity (based on the conditional(s) relating to each wish) seems to do the trick, more or less.