or…

This is just another Idea that came up to my mind on how to gather people’s “missings”.

A photo I saw on the web, depicting how Chinese people worship their ancestors or the gods. As a Chinese myself, I know very well about these traditions. It is a way of showing our respects to our ancestors, and ask for blessing and protection from them. But besides of worshiping our ancestors, every year in a certain time, we also goto the graves of our beloved, and we worship them as well. It is a ritual/custom that has been inherited in the core of Chinese culture.

Furthermore, I would like to say that this is a ritual more than just respecting and worshipping the dead. It also conveys a sense of “missing”. It’s a method of expressing how much we miss them, the ritual itself is a method of communication to the ones who has passed away in our life.

Rituals are more powerful than we can imagine, it restricts people to follow a certain path when they encounter a emotional event, and wants to express their feelings. 

So what if we could build something for people to express their feelings when they miss someone or something?

Maybe a bird house? you can write what you miss on a small note, and save it in the bird house? or maybe it’s the message in the bottle? or even we’ve strings tied onto a huge map?

Do you miss …. ?

One part of what creates solitary is the sense of being alone. It’s a common thing to feel alone, and it is also common to “miss” someone, something, or a memory when you feel alone. 

One of the things that would be interesting is to investigate this sense of “missing something”. We all have a time when we miss our family, our pets, or to some foreign students, missing the accent of their city.

Definition:

miss (REGRET)
to feel sad because you cannot see (a person or place) or do (something) .
miss (NOT FIND)
to notice that (something) is lost or absent .
miss out
to fail to use an opportunity to enjoy or benefit from something.

So what is it that creates this mixed sense of “regret”, lose and absent? Like what I stated in my previous post, I think it is the blank that exist in out heart. This blankness creates a space between us and the things we want to have, we want to own, we want to live with. It seems like it be valuable if we could somehow try to visualize the size or the distance of this space. 

Do you miss … ? How far is it? In which direction do you look for it? How deep do you miss it?

   

 

Before starting off this survey, maybe I’ll take a step back, and look into the questions that I want to be answered. A interview with some people might be necessary, just to get feedbacks of how people might react to these questions and finding which questions brings more value to the overall project.

I miss…?

Do you miss anything? Where is it? Point out the direction, describe the distance. ( mentally )

Why do you miss it? How often do you miss them? Does anything triggers your thought? or does it happens randomly?

What do you do when you miss something?

This emotion of missing something, is it closer to sadness? fear? anger? or happiness?
( use any word you like )

Five things that you miss the most, within the five you could only have one to take with you, which would you pick? why?

Tell me a story of the things you missed? ( If it doesn’t have one, make one )

If you a miss a person, would like her/him to be here now? If you miss a memory, would you want to relive it again? The things that you missed, would you want them to comeback or visit again?

 

These are just initial questions that I thought about, it still needs to be reorganized and maybe reworded. Besides interviewing face to face, I was also thought about maybe video recording them, but just a zoom up on the face and the hand. I looking for tiny hand gestures, movements and maybe face expressions that might happen when they answer these questions.