Documentation: Personal Space Project

 

As you learned from my video, I decided to transform the fountain on campus into a wishing well. I always thought that the whole concept of a wishing well was pretty funny and pointless. People put their whole fate into the simple act of tossing a coin into a fountain of water. Although this is a trivial tradition, for some reason I still like to participate in such acts myself.

I wanted to find a way to know what people were really wishing for, but I knew that if I just asked them, most would shy away. So I developed a system of color-coding the pennies into various categories which most wishes seem to fall under: Love, Happiness, Mean Thoughts, School/Work, Wealth/Material Gain, and Health. I started out with an equal number of pennies in each category so that I could count them at the end to come up with some statistical data. At first, people were somewhat confused, but I told them they could choose more than one penny from each category and make a wish however they normally would (although this probably distorted some of the data).

I found the overall response to my project to be very optimistic. Most people enjoyed making a wish and I even talked with some women who were happy that this empty fountain was actually being utilized. I found it funny that people would often ask "how do I make the wish" when figuring out how to throw the penny in the fountain. Some chose to turn around and throw it backwards and one guy (who came back twice to wish again) closed his eyes and stood there for a good twenty seconds before tossing the coin in. I am glad that the people who partook in my project had fun and felt uplifted by the experience. I think in a way it reminded them of childhood, and though this may sound cheesy, like they could still hope for even the most impossible wishes to come true. In the end, i even made a few wishes myself :)