May 29th, 2010 - proposal
I recently created Tools for Improved Social Interacting, a series of wearable devices that use sensors to condition the behavior of the wearer to better adapt to expected social behaviors. The Happiness Hat trains the wearer to smile more by measuring smile size, and turning a metal spike into the back of the head if the wearer stops smiling. The Body Contact Training Suit requires the wearer to maintain frequent body contact with another person in order to hear normally. The Anti-Daydreaming Device is a scarf that detects if the wearer is engaged in conversation with another person, and periodically shakes the wearer to remind him to pay attention and stop daydreaming.
The Tools series investigated the system of behavioral expectations we have of ourselves and others in social interactions on the level of individuals. I would like to expand on this work by looking at ways technology and feedback can be used among groups. These could be groups of acquaintances, strangers, friends, families, etc. Rather than wearable devices, I would like to focus on furniture and environments – that is, things used by several people at once.
How do our surroundings influence and mediate our social interactions, and what effects will shifting and manipulating them have on our relationships?
I am proposing a series of works that explore this area, beginning with a table that provides feedback to its users on the current collective subjective experience of sharing the table together. The base of the table will have knobs that the table sitters can adjust with their feet to indicate their current level of enjoyment of their experience. The table top will light up or dim in response to the sum rating of everyone at the table.
Simultaneously, I would like to develop a performance/participation-based event that allows viewers to interact with the pieces and with each other, discovering for themselves the ways in which their systems of social behavior are affected.
The table would serve as a beginning point for further development of this concept of environments that can alter our interactions. Another possible direction to explore is interventions in public environments. I am interested in creating objects and manipulations that work within the context of existing spaces. In doing so, I would attempt to shift the normal functions and programming of these environments to increase awareness of underlying structures and discover new possibilities of use.
Susan (June 2nd, 2010 at 12:22 am)
I especially like the wearables idea, as they represent our sociability on-the-go, en route, and existing as both social behavior and social display as fleeting, embedded experience. The furniture is more like an installation, a situation in which the subject is captured. The clothes capture the subject too but must be selected or worn, donned. Interesting that the choice of DIY knitting brings connotations of radical craft a la microRevolt etc. The modern furniture too brings strong connotations of the discourse of modernism and the history of the designer subjugating the client or user.
Olga (June 7th, 2010 at 10:17 am)
This is an interesting project with a lot of potential. I’m curious to see how the exploration of the influence of the environment unfolds in the future. At the moment I feel that it still needs to gain some more critical understanding of this idea of environments that shape behaviours. It comes very close to the whole concept of architectures of control but perhaps would benefit from emphasising its critical standpoint.
The same goes for the wearables. There is something sinister in those prototypes, it’s this idea of the designer subjugating the user, as Susan said. This makes the project controversial and ambiguous, which I believe is a good place for research. But again, perhaps these ideas would really take off if they went a step further in order to destabilise this logic of control they work on. It is somehow disturbing that the whole point is to normalise behaviour since this brings it dangerously close to the definition of societies of control. As I said, it is always very interesting to move inside those dangerous zones but it’s also important to acknowledge that we are doing so, and somehow look for ways of subverting those logics.
The project explores a field which is very interesting and points to the fact that technologies are never neutral, but instead they are embedded in complex political and social networks. The prototypes bring about a model of conduct – do not daydream, smile, get close to people – and build on a dynamic of punishment to implement it. That constitutes its most sinister aspect. This logic of punishment is the logic of disciplinary societies, while the idea of modulating the environment to subtly shape behaviour is the more current logic of soft control.
It is interesting that the project moves from one to the other. Perhaps this move could be taken as a practical exploration of these different logics. Dan Lockton has worked on a blog for some time now collecting design and architecture projects that exemplify this tendency to embed control into design, to use the environment to PRE-PROGRAM reality (http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/).
It’s a very interesting project. Looking forward to see how it develops!