HAIRITAGE
project documentation
INTRODUCTION
Hairitage is an AR artistic project that explores the historical and cultural significance of Black hair.
Through hairstyles: cornrows, braids, locks, and afro this project aims to highlight the ways in which Black hair has been used to express cultural identity and pride as well as discussing the impact of Eurocentric beauty standards on Black hair.
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Hairitage is as an artistic yet educational tool with a goal to promote greater respect, appreciation and awareness for Black culture and identity.
While Hairitage focuses on history, it also addresses current issues related to Black hair, such as discrimination in the workplace and schools and the constant cultural appropriation of Black hairstyles.
The purpose of this project is not only to educate those on who do not know the history of our hair but also to uplift those who struggle with loving their natural hair.
PROJECT INSPIRATIONS
There have been many instances, not just in the UK, where Black children have been sent home because of their hairstyles not being “fit” enough for the school environment. This is crazy because hair has no correlation to educational experience or performance.
This short anectdote also serves as another reason for the creation of Hairitage.
sped up screen recording of app logo creation made in canva
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During my years in education, I witnessed first and second-hand discrimination against our hair within schools towards both genders. I attended an all-girls secondary school where we had to wear uniforms that came with very specific and strict rules. However, there were no rules when it came to hair. I’ve always disliked rules but especially these as they always seemed so trivial. How does your accessories or the way you wear your clothes correlate with educational performance? It made no sense to me.
My circle of friends and I were told we weren’t allowed to wear coloured braids as it was considered “distracting” and could only wear “natural” colours. Like many teenagers around that age, experimentation was very important not only for fun but to develop and express ourselves and our creativity, but we were constantly stifled by teachers. Not only was removing our braids time consuming but also very expensive. At first, we would listen and swap the colours for more natural colours like lighter browns or blondes but still we were told our hair colours were not natural? The last time I checked brown, and blonde were natural hair colours. We were no strangers to detentions but to get penalised over how we wore our hair? It was unnecessary. Especially when I began to notice it was only our group and other Black children facing consequences. I would never see any non-Black person being reprimanded or told to change their hair colour even when they had they hair in greens, pinks, and other unnatural colours dyed.
In response my friends wore their hair in reds, greys, purples, and any other colour we wanted until eventually the teachers gave up on policing us about our hair.
ANOTHER INSPIRATION
The movie Hair Show is a classic Black movie that celebrates the beauty and diversity of Black hair.
THIS IS NOT MY VIDEO
A part in the movie, in particular, boosted my inspiration for this project [39:00-40:00] and it was when Simone (Cee Cee Michaela) and Gianni (Andre Blake) were explaining to Peaches (Mo'Nique) about why we embrace our natural hair.
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Simone says:
"See that is the problem, we need to stop accepting Western society's beauty standards"
and Gianni adds on:
"Its that diversity that makes Black hair so beautiful.
Straight hair, braids, dreads, cornrows, afros - its all about the flavour sister"
PROJECT DOCUMENTATION
original hairitage app logo
WEEK 1-4:
Over the course of the first four weeks of the project, I started the creation of all the paintings. During the first week I spent time breaking down and understanding the assignment brief and re-creating my project timeline. The timeline I had created during the first semester was not reflective of the actual time I had but rather just an outline for the things I needed to do.
In the week two, I began gathering materials and equipment, including paints and canvases, and started the digital sketching process. By the third week, I had finished my digital sketches and started to explore different colour palettes for the project. Finally, in the fourth week, I set up a projector to sketch my designs onto the canvases, ensuring I had the right angels and proportions [with help from my classmates Dom and Rana] before sketching all the pieces onto canvas.
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WEEK 5-8:
The next four weeks became what I call the “Pick n Mix” section of my creative process. As someone who has a low attention span, I tend to make myself do 101 things at once to maintain focus and engagement in any project I’m doing. This is not to say I found my project boring, but lack of focus can often hinder my creative process and make me become uninterested in what I’m doing. So, within these four weeks I alternated between painting, planning out this development document, doing other module work, unity set-up and a little content creation.
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I encountered some major difficulties colour mixing, but through research and experimentation with specific paints, I was able to overcome these challenges. I spent time exploring different colour schemes which involved multiple coats of paint and trial and error that frequently left me frustrated and at one point wanting to scrap everything and start again but I learned to trust the creative process and continued with the project.
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MORE DETAILS ON THE "PAINTING PROCESS" HERE:
sped up video of font letter preparation for creation of AR titles
updated version
During this time, I also set up the unity project and image targets on Vuforia. Although I’ve used Vuforia before setting up the image targets this time proved to be difficult this time around. Image targets are used so that unity can identify what to superimpose the AR elements on. I started by setting the image targets as the digital versions of the paintings thinking that it would be easier for the computer to recognise the faces of the portraits however that did not work. I was stuck for a while trying to figure out why as I followed the same method as my previous project until I realised the augmentable features were not the faces but the titles which the digital versions didn’t have. In the end, I had to finish all the paintings before being able to set up the unity project.
WEEK 8+:
The following weeks leading up submission were spent creating, building, testing and troubleshooting in the AR elements in Unity. Some of the processes included creating custom fonts in photoshop, editing and creating videos using my phone, coding scripts and behaviours in Unity for clickable buttons, and many others. I kept the purple and yellow colour scheme with the texts to add some more colour and dimensions to the AR elements while still keep them readable. This week was not as smooth sailing as it sounds,
I faced a few problems that unfortunately I did not manage to resolve. First were importing decorative fonts from websites like Dafont. There were quite a few fonts I would've liked to use but importing them into Unity proved to be difficult. Another one was with the tracking of the AR elements.
sped up video of title making process using photoshop
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DETAILS ON SOCIAL MEDIA HERE:
hairitage vs. user testing
Towards the end of the project, I also held a few focus groups to gather data on the effectiveness of Hairitage which was good for gaining insights on things I needed to add or change.User testing was done in order to gain valuable feedback. I used this to learn about the experience of running Hairitage and to understand how my audience felt once they had interacted with the project. My first step was creating a questionnaire on Microsoft forms. I opted to go for a combination of multiple choice and open-end questions to get both qualitative and quantitative data.
As highlighted in my research and development document, the results are evident that immersive tools such as AR are very helpful in creating an engaging educational experience as well as Hairitage being easy to use and appealing to consumers.
QR code for the Hairitage questionnaire for easy accsess
some results from the questionnaire
