dpstudiolab

As I’ve thought more about ‘Identity Creation’, I’ve think I’ve missed an important point, and that is the experience designed in a created identity. I could also be beating a dead horse, but here goes:

Identity Experience
How one Interacts with an Identity.

So I’ve briefly covered what goes into an identity from an external standpoint. In a company, it’s the external collateral that helps define said company’s image, but more over it is the internal business styles that reinforce and influence the company’s look and feel (L&F). In terms of presence there is also, however, the experience one finds with the company. This goes beyond the implications of customer service or product support to the point of a respected reputation that’s instantly recognizable. There needs to be a confidence in the collateral, a determination of the soul of the company or even person. In a person, it’s the ‘I-don’t-know-what’ feeling ones has around them, and since in these practices I’ve tried to strive for powerful individual identities (even considering they’re companies) that project a sort of calm security about them. Hopefully, one gets a sense from the designed collateral that the company knows its business in-and-out, and that the L&F bears that out.

Somewhere in the back of my mind screams the saying, ‘It’s the process, not the product, that matters.’ I think that applies here as experience is a process, and to quote an old cigarette ad, ‘experience is the best teacher/feature’ (I can’t remember how that one ends, but it’s one of those two and they both seem to work for my point). So would one have to experience these creations as real things, they’d go through the process of developing that sense of suspension of disbelief in order to consider these creations real, viable entities. Their experience of viewing such collateral would reinforce the persistence of the entities existence.

In closing, I’m half-way drawn to flesh out the websites I’ve designed to full fledged functionality to make the identities/entities even more real. This would envelope one in an actual interactive experience with the collateral and further promote the false identities as realities. In some sense this work is already done, as I would just refer to the company’s real-life competitor for inspiration on the internals of the websites. Like I said, having the L&F persist through out the site would be easy since they are so strictly defined.

As I’ve mentioned before, I substitute at a local high school and some times I’m lucky enough to fill in for the art teacher. On the whole though, I find myself being a History Teacher, Gym Teacher, Math Teacher, and I occasionally fill in long-term for English Teachers when they have babies. Not the men who are English Teachers, of course, but you know what I mean.

The question I’m most asked by other teachers I see around the campus is, “Who am I today?” Sometimes it promotes a fun little conversation about who’s out and why, but for the most part it is a Tedious semi-humorous greeting I have to put up with. This isn’t to say the Teachers aren’t witty and clever–quite the contrary, but for the most part such a joke becomes tiresome. I usually answer jokingly because sometimes I’m multiple people in one day and some teachers tease that I’m having an identity crisis. This gets me Thinking.
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