Process/Purpose
 
 
MAIN GOAL
Use streaming media to interrogate the loaded rituals around consumption, conversation, and convention at the dinner table as a way into understand the possible roles of streaming media in the home.

Activity Explanation
A prosthetic table top equipped with overhead webcams, a multi-monitor chandelier, and sound “catchers” under the dinner plates will be installed concurrently in the homes of both study families. The table prosthetic captured specific “slices” of the dinner table experience rather than the whole experience and beamed it to the other family, in a one to one relationship.We did this because we wanted to isolate the experience of eating, and to recognize the an inherent quality of streaming media is that it delivers a narrow bandwidth of experience. It was possible, of course, that this way of connecting and communicating was highly unsatisfying or disturbing to the families. However, our goals are not to provide a better or more fun/realistic way to connect through media (that is the job of, for example, Skype developers and the nice people at Apple) but to try to understand the possible roles of streaming media in a domestic context.The study took place simultaneously in two homes, over two consecutive night’s dinners. On the first night the sound of the utensils on the plates and the overhead visual of the eating of the foods off the plates were the only explicitly permitted forms of communication.On the second night we enabled the families to communicate about themselves via markers, sticky pads and paper table cloths.
 
Goals and areas of inquiry
At the beginning of this term, our big goal was how can streaming media affect family’s ritual. So my question was based on that big question, how the changes of family rituals are going to looks like. But it was changed and move in a different way while we tried to experiment with different angle of webcam and different media such as contact mics and notepad. Because with bird eye view camera angle it was not all about family ritual rather than it was the question aobut how the relationship would look like between inside of the camera and out side of the camera. So my final question became how they would define inside and outside of their area by their own ways.
 

 
 
 
 
 
tableCafeteria
 
 
 
 
 
installing tables at each family's home