TALETELLING MACHINES

In this project, three interactive installations were designed to detect and observe human psychology, raising a question whether interaction design can provide a vision for studying human behavior in a game-like way.

Collaborative project with Sara Moore and Hoon Oh. Video edited by Ina Xi.

Machine #1, BUTTON PRESSING TRAP

A single gesture of pressing the button turned turn out to be unexpectedly addictive, and was made fully conscious under the rule of a game.

We set up the rule as "whoever presses the button for the longest time becomes the winner" and watched how people interact with it. We called it a 'trap' because once the competitive nature is aroused, people just don't want to let it go. We witnessed how participants waived their precious morning time pressing a giant button, to get their names on top of the podium.

Machine #2, Window Collaging

We scattered an array of paper collages along the hall way. The collages had a tag on their back, asking people to paste them to the window. When people did this, they created the juxtaposition between the collage and the scenery out of the window. Once they became aware of that, they started to play with the compositin and different options of it.

Machine #3, TRAGICOMEDY pDISPENER

The "Tragicomedy Dispensing Machine" stood right in front of the cafeteria. A roll of towel produced sheets with tragicomedies printed on it. People can pull one and showed their opinion-whether they think the story is sad or a funny-by tossing the sheet to different parts of the wooden box. It was designed in an attempt to make people externalize their emotion and personality in a public place.

Previous experiments