The Two People Phone
Instructor: Anne Burdick chair of the Media Design Department
The Two People Phone
For the past few months I was tinkering with the idea 'how a third object can change family conversation, body language, gestures, and spatial relationship'. During the first 2 Super Studio terms we started alienating a familiar object, taking it out of its context, and turning its interface into some kind of provocation / rebel. The skin for this new object did not support its interface in the sense that it was not ugly or rebel looking, but instead it was soft, big, 'just huggable'. We were curious if this would create some kind of conflict between user, the behavior of the object, and its looks. After placing it into a family home and having them experience its full behavior, we were aiming for the family members to get mad at the object. But instead we found that they did not get angry at our creation for controlling their telly, instead they got mad at each other for not being able to work the device correctly. This is something we did not expect at all. This term, which was an individual study?
I started reflecting on the past two terms and working with three bounding terms 'Provocation / Play / Interaction'.
Why did the family members did get mad at each other and not the object? Was it because the object's 'good looking and soft' skin or do we in general rather get mad at each other instead of objects? Would the whole scenario have changed if the 'rebel object' would have looked 'horrible' and 'unfriendly' from the outside, but then would you still want to engage with it. It would loose its appeal, wouldn't it? How can the skin of an object change our behavior, trick us, and most importantly provoke everything but a picture-book situation? Playing around with this concepts and these questions I ended up with this main focus 'HOW CAN AN OBJECT CONNECT OR DISCONNECT TO THINGS OR PEOPLE?'
I created the 'two people interactive phone'. It looked like a phone and partly acted like one, but its constrain was that two people had to operate it together in order to make it work.?The whole process and images can be viewed on my blog.
For more information please view the BLOG
http://cholzheid.wordpress.com/category/play/