BRIANNA FILL

Brianna Fill aspires to explore different ways to fill the shoes of a designer, from graphic design and design research to teaching. Her curiosity about the world and its people motivated her decision to teach English abroad so that she can connect with diverse communities and ideas. Her degree project aims to create empathy for different perspectives within a college campus by catalyzing meaningful relationships between international students and their host-campus communities.

___

“FRANKLY, INTERNATIONAL AND HOST-NATIONAL STUDENTS FEEL A LITTLE AWKWARD AROUND EACH OTHER.”

A college education equips young adults with much more than a specialized degree as they enter their independent adulthood; it provides social experiences and conflicts that guide them to be informed and empathetic as they find their roles within our society. A major resource to the higher education system is the international study abroad program. Both the students who are abroad and the communities of students that host them can expand their perspectives by exposing themselves to the views and ideas of people with different cultural backgrounds and experiences. 

However, there is a major social flaw within this program that prevents us from maximizing these experiences:

Frankly, international and host-national students feel a little awkward around each other.

It is this discomfort that inspired designer Brianna Fill to research how this social system operates at the University of Arkansas. 

After conducting interviews and surveys with local students and experts, Brianna discovered two key themes: the campus lacks convenient and comfortable touch points that students will be motivated to participate in, and students in both groups find it challenging to step outside of their comfort zones, limiting their motivation to reach out to members of the other group. So, how do we incentivize students from different cultural backgrounds to go out of their way to have awkward conversations with each other? Brianna’s answer: stickers!

Remember that smiley face sticker you got when you were being potty trained? Or that dinosaur sticker you got for sharing your toy in kindergarten? These tiny, seemingly-insignificant pieces of sticky paper evidently leave imprints on our memories, tattooing these moments of accomplishment and education in our minds to be recalled decades later. It is this magical quality of stickers and Fayetteville’s rich sticker culture that inspired FayetteVoyage.

FayetteVoyage is an ecosystem designed to intervene in the current relationship between international students and their host campuses. The sticker collections are released annually, representing each country the campus is hosting students from as well as participating RSOs and campus departments. Stickers are designed by students through the FayetteVoyage RSO which fosters a collaboration between students who describe facets of their culture and students who turn these stories into artwork for the stickers that adhere to the FayetteVoyage brand guidelines. Stickers will be distributed in bulk to the students they represent to then be traded and distributed to other students at curated events or through organic interactions.

Students can celebrate their international classmates, neighbors, and friends by proudly sporting the designs on their laptops and car bumpers amidst the rest of their sticker collections. FayetteVoyage stickers represent the stories from the students who inspired the design as well as the sticker holder’s memory of the student they traded with to obtain it.

In order to move past the awkward moments, we have to confront them head-on. We can embrace these unfamiliar conversations and bond over artwork that carries old stories for some and new experiences for others.