<aside> 💡 Team: Individual Project
</aside>
<aside> ⌛ Duration: August - December 2023 (5 Months)
</aside>
<aside> 👤 Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer, Prototyper, Tester
</aside>
The Philippines is an archipelago made of over a hundred different islands and hundreds of different cultures. Before the 1500s, hundreds of tribes existed across the islands and were influenced by Indonesian, Hindu, Muslim, Shintu, Buddhist, and Christian traditions. In the 1500s, they were colonized by Spain, turning the Philippines into a predominantly Catholic country.
The effects of the Spanish colonization reached far beyond religion, however. Filipinos began to build a colonial mentality - making them feel inferior to and want to become more like their Spanish oppressors. This created behaviors and desires such as having pale skin, marrying into white families, and wanting to be more “Americanized” by speaking mostly English or moving to the United States. In third-culture Filipino Americans, this creates identity confusion and lessens awareness of their culture.
DiwataVenture is a solution that allows users to explore, share, and reflect on pre-colonial Philippine mythology. It allows users to explore Philippine history in a means that they can bring to life in the modern world. This project aims to provide a representation of the numerous cultures that exist in the Philippines and increase access to pre-colonial Philippines education.
Filipino American young adults live in between two different cultures – Filipino and American culture, otherwise known as the third culture. Furthermore, many Filipinos in both the Philippines and the United States possess a colonial mentality, which has been passed down through generations as a result of Spanish colonization. One result of colonization is the loss of indigenous culture, as the third step in the colonial model is that the colonized are portrayed as wild, savage, and uncivilized people.
For this project, I wanted to know if learning about pre-colonial Philippine mythology would decrease and heal the colonial mentality in Filipino Americans aged 18-25. DiwataVenture will be approached using design thinking and user-centered design. The goal is to make mythology easy to digest and encourage users to share and discuss it with an online community.
<aside> 🏞️ Third-culture Filipino Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 who feel a lack of self-identity, knowledge of their culture, and have access to a mobile device will use this project to engage in learning about Pre-Colonial Filipino mythology, as measured by the amount of stories explored.
</aside>
<aside> 🔶 Representing hundreds of cultures within a single mobile application
</aside>
<aside> 🔶 Having a single source of myths and folk tales that could be easily imported into the app
</aside>
<aside> 🔶 The ability to find and add enough stories to the app to represent everyone due to time constraints
</aside>
DiwataVenture is an interactive experience where users can explore and share Philippine mythology. The proposed technology is to code a web app through React Native. With this technology, I will be coding in JavaScript to create stacks and navigation, making a seamless experience. Using JavaScript, I will be able to add interactions that are not possible in just a Figma prototype. It will be able to be used by both Android and Apple phone users.