This project is related to the project named “Welcome to the University of Twente by EWI“. In this project, I was asked to produce a card for a number of teams. The cards were used to assign a name and a number to a group. Of couse I thought that was rather boring, so I decided to continue with the theme of cats from the project “Welcome to the University of Twente by EWI“. Each card has the name of the team in Dutch and in English. All of them were used during the acculturation activities of EWI. This is a standard procedure that the University of Twente implements, to help International and Dutch students to know each other better.
The acculturation games are aimed at both Dutch and International students to collaborate and work on a team. It is often the case, that international students struggle to form groups or integrate in the larger society when they are studying at universities with a large number of international students, like the University of Twente. The university, in its efforts to minimize this separation, conducts regular acculturation games that allow both International and Dutch students to collaborate and make teams.
For this project, I was careful to minimize any ethnic stereotype. I tried my best to avoid unintentional offending depictions of a culture. For this reason, all the cats have a character based on popular movie characters. As for the names of the team, I placed first the Dutch name and then the English name. I decided to place the names in this order due to the fact that the project was going to be used in the Netherlands.
I am aware that Dutch people don’t feel uncomfortable at all with English. Doing it the other way around would probably cause no controversy. In fact, it is common to see products in the supermarket that are completely labeled in English. However, I personally opted to do it this way, because Dutch is after all the language of the Netherlands, and it is spoken by almost everyone in the country. It is just logical to do it in such fashion. Additionally, by own experience I can say, that one can’t really fully merge into a society if one does not speak the language of the society in question. The Dutch just happen to be extremely flexible to other languages, specially English. It is I guess, a trait they have inherited from their merchant ancestors.
At the end I created 10 different illustrations. Each illustration had the name of each team member around it. However, due to privacy considerations, I will only show the illustrations and the names of the teams in the image gallery.
Name of the Project: Katten van EWI
Purpose: Educational
Client: Universiteit Twente (supervised by Dr. Jan Schut and Lilian Spijker)
Location: Enschede, The Netherlands
Date: Aug 2012