Snoop Assignment One

Assignment One: Are You What You Wear/Buy/Sit On/Sleep In/Talk To?

To begin with we were asked to read the book “Snoop” by Sam Gosling, over the Christmas holidays. To be a hundred percent honest, I was really excited to read this book, but once I got into it I have to say I was a little bit disappointed. It felt as though the author was repeating himself and a lot of it was just common knowledge. Although I have to say some parts were highly interesting. I enjoyed the part of the book where Gosling speaks about the way people walk and how you can distinguish what a person’s personality can be like.

Although I never really enjoyed the book as a whole, it did help me a little bit when completing Assignment One. We were asked to swap photographs of either pictures of us between the age of 13-20 or photo’s of our room/house, with a person we never knew.  The girl I had sent pictures of both, so it made it a little easier to find out what she’s like. I have to say I feel I found a lot more stuff out about the girl from her flat, rather than the actual photos of her.

Even though I already knew Shona did Interior & Environmental Design at Uni. There were a lot of clues both about her and her flat that assured me. The first area of creativity I noticed was in a picture of Shona at Halloween, when she was 18. It was a handmade cardboard box made up perfectly to look like to little ghosts. I just think it shows her artistic nature because she has went into a lot of effort to dress up rather than buying an outfit. In a picture of Shona at another age, she has a different hairstyle, where it is both blonde and black. The contrasting colours are every bold and suggest to me that she likes to stand out from the crowd and perhaps changes her image quite often to look unoriginal. In almost all the photographs over the years, she pulls funny faces/poses in them. I get the impression that Shona is quite an outgoing person and is confident in herself and always up for a laugh.

When going through the photographs of Shonas’ flat I have to say it is one of the most organised, clean and arranged flat I have ever seen!  There is actually no clutter at all. One of the wall art pieces said “but I always say, one’s a company, two’s a crowd and three’s a party”. I think Shona enjoys socializing and gets on well with all types of people in a crowd and meeting new people. She has a lot of wall art around the flat! I liked the area where there were blank photo frames that stood out from the purple painted wall. I get the impression she is proud of her flat and enjoys making it her own. It has a modern creative around it and looks very welcoming.

Unless the flat has been arranged for the photographs being taken, I would say that Shona has a small bit of OCD. I noticed this more when looking at the picture of her wardrobe. Tops were on white hangers on the left side and trousers were on black hangers on the other side. The final bit I noticed was a picture of a Banana by Andy Warhol, which Shona also had a tattoo of on the top of her back. She obviously enjoys art and to go to the extreme of tattooing it onto her body, gives me the impression that she isn’t afraid to say what she feels and it overall a confident and bold person.

I met up with Shona on Monday night in the Union and discussed what we had written about each other. I have to say it was crazy what the outcome was.  I really thought that some of the stuff wouldn’t be true but once I thought about the things she imagined they were actually all true and she felt the same about what I said about her.

I looked up The Johari Window which is: “is a cognitive psychological tool created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955^[1] in the United States, used to help people better understand their interpersonal communication and relationships. It is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise”.

It is a table split into four different quadrants: Open Hidden, Blind Spot and Unknown.

Open: Adjectives that are selected by both the participant and his or her peers are placed into the Open quadrant. This quadrant represents traits of the subjects that both they and their peers are aware of.
Hidden: Adjectives selected only by subjects, but not by any of their peers, are placed into the Hidden quadrant, representing information about them their peers are unaware of. It is then up to the subject to disclose this information or not.
Blind Spot: Adjectives that are not selected by subjects but only by their peers are placed into the Blind Spot quadrant. These represent information that the subject is not aware of, but others are, and they can decide whether and how to inform the individual about these "blind spots".
Unknown: Adjectives that were not selected by either subjects or their peers remain in the Unknown quadrant, representing the participant's behaviors or motives that were not recognized by anyone participating. This may be because they do not apply or because there is collective ignorance of the existence of these traits
I feel this table helped me a little bit in realizing my and peoples traits and how you do not realised things about you until you are told by somebody else. For example Shona could guess that I was an image conscious person and that I like to have clothes matching etc. Which I only really realised once she told me.