‘Curious Guide’ is an initiative aimed to help foreign students at TU Dublin. It is a college-based project that I worked on with two other classmates of mine, Sammi Yip and Laura Apalmo. All of us are multi-ethnic and bilingual, and all of us have previously experienced being or feeling foreign in college environment. It is a very unique kind of experience with plenty of issues and nuances that many local students would not understand. For that reason, we designed a website which contained simplified information on the matters that foreign students would need to research, such as college facilities, visa requirements, local slang and so on. It will become active once our college provides the funding. The basics of our design approach were simplicity and functionality, as it was important to make our product easy and pleasant to read.
We also created a Curious Guide that included a set of index cards with the shortened version of all of the important information and contacts that a TU Dublin student would need.
The awareness campaign of our project included Curious Cards (promotional cards with short bits of helpful information) and posters (featuring personal photographs of people from different countries) placed all over the campus in order to make the environment more welcoming and claim the college space.
Another part of the awareness campaign was an event purposed to help foreign students meet up and socialise. To do that, our team designed a set of game cards with questions that would help people open up, share the ‘foreign’ experiences and bond.