Thesis prototyping in session. There is something quite exquisite about wires on traditionally analog mediums. <3
Kids used to ask each other: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Now there’s a microphone in every tree and a loudspeaker on every branch, not to mention the video cameras, and we’ve entered the condition that David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective.”
This week was a watershed for Total Noise. When terrible things happen, people naturally reach out for information, which used to mean turning on the television. The rewards (and I use the word in its Pavlovian sense) can be visceral and immediate, if you want to see more bombs explode or towers fall, and plenty of us do. But others are learning not to do that.
[…]
You can get your cable news secondhand, via Twitter or the blogs, which is a little like using a mirror to avoid gazing upon the Gorgon directly.
[…]
We need to get smarter about the vectors of time and information flow. We know what the hurry is, of course. It is devoutly felt at CNN and Fox News that prestige or viewership or both depend on being the first, even if only by seconds, to announce practically anything. They continue to believe this, even though no one remembers which of them was first to announce erroneously that the Supreme Court had overturned the Affordable Care Act—rushing to botch a fact that had been officially released to the entire infosphere and would soon be universally available to everyone. “We gave our viewers the news as it happened,” Fox said smugly later that day.
It starts to feel as though we’re Pavlov’s dogs—subjects in a vast experiment in operant conditioning. The craving for information leads to behaviors that are alternately rewarded and punished. If instantaneity is what we want, television cannot compete with cyberspace. Nor does the hive mind wait for officialdom.
[…]
We’re starting to sense what may happen when everything is seen and everyone is connected. Bits of intelligence amid the din; and new forms of banality. Within hours of his death, the world could examine the videos Tamerlan Tsarnaev watched in his YouTube account and, on his Amazon wish list, some books he wanted.
Source: stoweboyd
The art of asking
For the past couple of weeks, I have been working on my thesis user journeys. Having done these before in group projects I was fairly confident of getting together the resources and shooting quickly.
However, I was in for a surprise. Not only was it hard asking for help from actors outside the class, it was also not something I was good at- Asking I realized is an art. I expected friends and acquaintances to drop all they were doing and be invested in my work without really giving them any incentive. Luckily my friend, Anita who works as a production assistant at R/GA told me a simple rule:
“There are three kinds of incentives - Money, the promise of a great time and friendship; to ask for investment in something as time consuming as video, you have to be able to provide one or more of these.”
and I was providing neither. She also sent me this great talk by Amanda Palmer, it is not only relevant in the context of asking, but also in the context of the public presentations we are soon going to make. It comes from her heart and so you want to listen, to what she has to say and what she has to ask. Brilliant.
Some Testing
Some quotes from the user testing:
“It sounds like a secret”
“I get the message in the bottle idea”
“It feels precious, so i’m more thoughtful of what I say into it”
“I like that I learnt something I wasn’t looking to learn”
“I would like some insignia of the previous recorder”
“Does this stay only between Alex and me?”
“I’m just going to be brutally honest ok?”
“I wish I could leave it in my house for myself- kind of like an audio photograph, and then many years later listen to it”
“There is something intensely personal about this experience”
“Oh, I love the lo-fi sound, cause history always has and always will sound like this”
Stopping, thinking and remembering: New conversations in tech
Over the past year, I have tried to articulate better every single day, my viewpoint that is embedded and at the core of not just my thesis but also my approach to design. Having not been comfortable with the tag of “designer as a problem solver” or “an artist” I have often found myself stuck somewhere in the middle, not really being able to clearly define this viewpoint.
However, since the final presentations are merely a month’s distance, I am forcing myself to clarify this viewpoint, in order to get others to understand the motivations behind my process. Yesterday I came across articles by two people much more articulate than I am, expressing what I have been trying so hard to get at. In an article titled Machines of Laughter and Forgetting, Evgeny Morozov writes:
“Alas, most designers, following Wilde, think of technologies as nothing more than mechanical slaves that must maximize efficiency. But some are realizing that technologies don’t have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas…
..While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an “aesthetic of friction” that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought — nay, contemplation — slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?”
Further, in this year’s The Pastry Box Project titled Shaping the web, Liz writes:
“The new connected is to be disconnected. Deadspots are the new hotspots.
Moving toward is moving away, and hence, the notion of density and progress has changed. It’s our job to pause, coordinate, and design opportunities for chance”
Reading these emerging thoughts in tech, not only gave me a sense of validation but also motivated me to continue trying to clarify, frame, articulate and express my outlook at the role of technology in design.
The first step in prototyping, is finding the right container.
Looking back, looking ahead: thesis stream of consciousness
Its Friday morning, and I sit here to describe my thoughts for my thesis, not for anyone else, but just for me. So that I have things clear in my head and then i can proceed to structure my presentation.
Lets start from the very beginning.Last winter, I experienced my very first snow. Needless to say it was magical. The first thing i wanted to do was to share that experience with my family. So I called them and told them how its was, when i felt that was not sufficient, i asked them to come on video chat. I tilted my laptop out of my apartment window and followed the motion of the snow to show them the whole environment in its entirety. They could estimate what it felt like, they could see it in two dimensions but they couldn’t really experience it. That led me to start questioning our modes of communication and what kind of sensorial data they actually end up filtering. Our way of communication adapts to it without even realizing that we are letting go of some pivotal parts that make up of an authentic communication. Just like power point changed forever the way we present and structure our thoughts, making everything into a linear build, our modes of communication are changing the way we communicate much the same way.
What is authentic communication? To me authentic communication is the one that involves passing of information through our stronger sensory modalities. All of my most powerful and impactful memories are triggered by and made up of senses other than sight, they are made up of smells of home cooked food, petrichor nights, popular music of the era, sounds of the street etc. These senses have been scientifically proven to have a clearer and stronger co relation to our memory and cognition than sight does, and yet our culture today is heavily biased to experiences primarily catering to sight. Designing for hearing is something that is done more as an after thought, and for smelling is very rarely touched, except in a cartoonified way at retail stores of luxury brands or as alarms in our iphones.
Since even before I applied to this course, and the reason for coming here was a deep frustration with the way that our current technologies handle the more softer, more human and more emotional side of us. Our interfaces and mediums are efficient and convenient, and we have to interact with them increasingly every single day. These interactions with our communication technology makes up a large chunk of our day to day lives, yet it refuses to stir any emotions in us. These interactions are the product of an economy of convenience. I don’t remember the last technology mediated interaction which was joyful or meaningful to me in any way. What is meaningful? The Merriam-Webster describes meaningful as significant, and substantial.
Being away from home, from everything that is familiar and dear to me, I constantly find myself thinking about my past memories. They are my data bank, my library and my resources for navigating the present and the future. They are the way i derive a sense of identity and belonging, which is because of the sensorial channel through which these memories are encoded.
These musings on memory made me pull back and do extensive research on the science of memories. What I found was a much clearer more structured way to describe my hunches. For the uninitiated, there are three separate process that take place in the memory part of the brain(hippocampus), memories are encoded, stored and retrieved. We retrieve memories from the storage constantly, that is how we are able to keep our memory updated to navigate into the future, using memory as a meaning-making device. Though this research I created a framework, for creating memorable interactions. - according to which there are three ways that an interaction can be made memorable:
1. Through nostalgia (when a memory is relived and hence strengthened)
2. Through surprise (when a bad/fear memory is replaced with a new memory to reduce the negative connotations of it)
3. Through learning (when we learn new semantic information, like learning a new language, having an experience for the first time)
How am I to do that? Through what medium, and through what interface?
I am in essence creating a new way of interacting with our objects, our technology which interfaces with our emotions and not our logical and task oriented brain.
It is this new way of interaction that is my thesis.
At first, I was considering the kind of meta data can be added to a video conversation to reflect the context a little better than the way we do it currently. Skin sensor, temperature, light, micro expression interpretations and humidity sensors were some of the metrics that I considered. Due to the technical limitations of working with a live communication stream, I decided to see what happens when an overlay of contextual sound is added to already existing stream of data.
And so I chose a book, not because of what it represents but because of the curated and edited content that exists already in the form of books. After choosing some paragraphs from a piece by Kafka, I made a quick audio track combining binaural sounds of the context in the book. Listening to it over and over again, the only thought in my head was “these are not the pigeons that Kafka imagined” which is right at this point. But I imagined that in the future or an alternate present, books would be authored in collaboration with sound designers to mirror the experience that the author intended. After prototyping it for a few times, and talking to people about it, it was soon apparent to me that the book as an object has taken on a lot bigger importance than i had originally intended. Because of the cultural associations and baggages that come with the book, and the fact the it is an inherently meaningful object.
This is when everything started to get messy and complicated, having no background in sound I have no way of determining what kind of sounds to use, what will be successful in creation nostalgia? is nostalgia universal or does it need to be personalized? And if it needs to be personalized then, where is this personal information coming from? One possible hypothesis was that this data could come through the data that is being collected every single day, about our emails messages, social media updates etc. That again felt a little bit devoid of the human aspect that i have been stressing all this while. It seems very calculated and algorithmic. I went back to my original brainstorming of ideas to pull out other objects that might demonstrate ‘surprise’ and ‘learning’ just as the book demonstrates nostalgia(?).
This is when I resurrected the idea of voice messages in a bottle- for fear conditioning memories, as an object you would be able to pick up a bottle, talk into it about your fears, and leave them behind- cast it away. This way when I use an object that is devoid of previous baggage, stories and meanings I can demonstrate the effect of using it as an emotional interface.
So where does this leave me now? Is it joy, nostalgia, the feeling of being touched, sentimental or all of those, and of course why do I want them to feel this way?
User interview quote (at SVA MFA Interaction Design Dept) by Avinash Rajagopal
For the past few days I’ve been feeling like i’m swimming upstream in the flood of thesis. This puts things in perspective. Clarity, structure and articulation is the only answer.
Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff, but it sets you free.
~ Emma Coats in Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling
Current state of thesis.
tash wong: One particular possible future
I discovered Stop the Cyborgs this morning. They are a response to Google Glass and other trends and work to make us aware of the creeping (privacy threatening) trajectories of these technologies.
“More generally our argument is that technological systems shape daily life and society. They are not politically or socially neutral but rather encourage and discourage different choices, interaction patterns and ways of being. At the moment there seems to be a view that technology is an external force which follows a fixed trajectory. People claim “You can’t fight the future” by which they mean “One particular possible future“. This view is completely wrong. The direction of technological development is not pre-ordained but rather is shaped by people’s choices. At the moment these choices are being made for us all by a small group of silicon valley people with one particular world view. This again is not inevitable.”
Glad more people are thinking about possible futures :)
Catching up on thesis after a 10 day break (at Cafe Royal)
Birds, like poems, should not mean, but be.
Schafer R. Murray in The Soundscapes: Our Sonic Environment and Tuning of the World.
Flying books & talking cities: A look at design futures
“A picture may be a thousand words, but a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.”
What happens when there is a headphone jack in your hardcover book? ”Bound by a thread” by Sana Rao exhibited at the MoMa today, is a critical look at a designers role in authoring everyday experiences with objects.
The pieces designed by her are deeply immersive in the way they bring forth, what it means to be designing experiences for all our senses.
Today in thesis class we were asked to do futurescaping of our own and write a press release for our final thesis exhibit.
A very refreshing dreamy-eyed approach to thesis thinking.
Pillars of experience & Project envy
Just so I can come back to this, if along the way I lose sight of what really is important to achieve for my thesis.
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