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For the first time ever I was given very little feedback from my tutor on my lo-fi self portrait and a great deal of feedback from fellow students. This is incredibly different to what I am used to. We were given a set of guidelines to assess each others work:

Yellow hat: positive optimistic something that worked well
Red Hat: gut feeling initial reaction
Black Hat: something that didn’t work
Green Hat: another idea you got from the work-an alternative

When I first realised this was the approach that our tutor wanted us to take, I began to question if it would be effective enough for me.

Were the students were capable of giving me the critical feedback of a well-studied tutor or lecturer? No, they most definitely cannot. But what they did give me was something much more valuable.
They gave me inspiration.

Inspiration to look at things from various perspectives.

Inspiration to reconsider and re-evaluate.

Inspiration to think different.

By seeking feedback from the students I was able to get a wider range of feedback and that’s exactly what I needed.
I also had to give feedback to others and I made a few observations of my own and noticed how different people express themselves.

There were two main approaches that I noticed …

Artistic approaches:
Some people chose to express their identity in non-literal ways and use external things such as light and shape. They chose things that were ambiguous and could be interpreted in various ways.
This approach gave a similar feel to a first impression, when meeting someone in person. It also allowed me as a viewer to make my own mind up about their identity rather then being told how to view it.

Obvious approaches:
Showed themselves and the things around them, such as their rooms and their possessions to show who they are. This gave a similar feel to an interview. It was a bit like an information overload on one single person. The benefit to this approach was that I did get a good sense of the person on a whole, but only on a superficial level. I could only interpret a small amount of things for myself and was given only a very controlled image of the individual, as I was only exposed to what they wanted me to see.

This allowed me to compare my work to the work of others and think about how differently I could have approached the task.

 For my self portrait I took a more obvious approach. I chose to theme my portrait as ‘a day in the life of me.’ After all the feedback given to me, and the feedback I gave to others, I thought up a few things that I would like to do differently next time…

I would want to keep the same theme, but rather than showing everything in plain format of my bed and my desk I would like to take a more artistic approach. I would make it less literal allow the individual to put together the pieces of my identity and from that make their own opinion on who I am, rather than me showing them who I think I am. This will hopefully give a similar feel to how it would be meeting me in real life.

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