Modeling Communications

I attended a workshop called Modeling (Interculture) Communication. At first, I had no idea what this workshop was for. I came in clueless. Most of my classmates thought it was some sort of modeling class. But it turns out it was about learning about how we communicate between different cultures.

The course that I am currently studying is international. Which means everyone comes from different countries, different family backgrounds, different walks of life. There are lots of differences among us and therefore the purpose of this workshop to educate us on how we can better understand each other's differences and cultures.

Using legos.


First activity 

For the first activity of the workshop, we were asked to build the tallest tower and it had to include a window with the legos that we have on our table. 5 minutes were on the clock.

I pretty much went with the flow. I made sure that I had a strong foundation and slowly worked my way up. At the back of my mind, I knew had to include a window so I was trying to build the window and at the same time make my tower as tall as possible. While I was building it, it reminded me of the Changi Airport tower in Singapore.


Second activity

The second activity, we were given a post-it note. We had to draw out a mind map about culture and build our legos based on that mind map.

I built my lego based on my experience of moving to London and how I was immersed by all the culture here. The blocks represent the different countries, ethnicity, nationalities in London. I was going more of an abstract approach. Then I placed a human lego that represents me, on top of all the blocks.


Third activity

The third activity was to build legos based on a situation where you experienced miscommunication. The situation that I built my legos around was when I first moved to London, I bumped into my new flatmate who is from China. She asked me where to get toilet paper in Chinese but I did not understand her because my Chinese was very bad. So I asked her back in Chinese whether she was asking me what I was studying. It was then that she realised that I completely mistranslated her question and so she asked me in English. It was kind of embarrassing.

So, I used a turtle lego to represent me (because I'm slow at Chinese) and I made the setting look like a pantry because there was where this incident happened.

It was kind of funny when I explained it to my group mates.

After that, we were asked to pass our structure to the person to the right and we had to create a solution for it.


Last activity

At the end of the session, everyone was asked to put their structures together. This structure consists of everyone's solutions to their "miscommunicated" structures.

Educating is key. That was what I brought back after this workshop. Everyone is different and that is okay. However, having an open mind and learning about each other's cultures allows us to see other's people perspective. Not everything is about ourselves.