Love Is Free

“Only when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace”

-       Jimmy Hendrix

So this is where our project starts. The quote above encompasses what we aimed to do beautifully. When we heard of what was being asked from us for this assessment we knew straight away what we wanted to do. Both Nora and I are extremely moved by this concept of ‘love’, and the ways in which whilst it is free to give, so few of us choose to give it or allow ourselves to receive (ß The inspiration for the name of our website).

In the creation of our project, we collated a list of ideas to describe what we were really wanting to achieve:

-       Inspire people to be kind and perform acts of kindness

-       Show that the only way to fight negativity in the world is through positivity

-       Why do we hate with conviction but love so so?

-       Could we show the effect of embracing positivity and honesty?

-       Could we imagine a world that functioned in this way? How can we get others to imagine this too?

The most prominent thing we found when researching this idea of love is that there simply isn’t enough of it. A quick Google search of ‘hate statistics in Europe’ lead us to this:

Funnily enough, when we googled ‘love statistics in Europe’, we found nothing.

Nora and I quickly realised the world was lacking love, and we set ourselves the challenge of changing this. With social media at the forefront of this generation, we created a website:

www.loveisfree2017.wordpress.com

Using several persuasion techniques including social proof, similarity heuristics, repetition, availability heuristics and emotional narratives, we wrote a series of blog posts all of which praised this crazy idea of love.  The blog posts share stories from both Nora and I, along with friends and family who were kind enough to share their stories with us, and some other narratives we felt the need to expose to our readers.

In order to get our website ‘out there’ we also created 4 different posters which we distributed around campus. Our main poster visually presented our website name ‘Love is Free’, and the other 3 sub posters presented the opening picture from our website along with some quotes we felt encompassed our website image perfectly:

Main Poster = 

Sub Poster 1 = 

Sub Poster 2 = 

Sub Poster 3 = 

These posters were created in the hope that they would be recognised all over campus, the repetition and the way in which they all followed the same salient formats would subsequently lead people to stumble across our website and give it a read.

I suppose the main goal of our project is presented in our website introduction – to inspire others. By creating a platform whereby readers could unlock their own potential to spread kindness throughout the world we aimed to fight hate with love.

Megan Bowers and Nora Popova.