week 14. Hertzian Tales (chap7)

 1. "...five conceptual design proposals for postoptimal

electronic objects: Electroclimates, When Objects Dream . . . , Thief

of Affections, Tuneable Cities, and Faraday Chair."

2. "Each proposal is a material tale, a process of investigation. They are “valuefictions”:

they try to maintain a degree of technological realism while exploring

values different from those current."

3. Thief of Affection explores designing role models and psychosocial narratives. From “Electroclimates”

emerges ideas for genotypes, pseudo-interviews, and poetic products.

“When Objects Dream . . .” offers alternative conceptions of the smart object as

dreamy object, and new tools like the gaussmeter for mapping hertzian space.

“Tuneable Cities” explores overlapping electromagnetic and urban spaces using

a car and scanner to experience a city.

4. Electroclimates: Abstract Radio

This proposal developed from my desire to create a post-optimal object that

answered aesthetic needs within a context of everyday life. It would be an aid

for poetically inhabiting the electrosphere, a contemplative object revealing the

hertzian nature of our environment.

5. On another level, Electroclimates is a response to the communications that invade

domestic spaces.

6. Screens are like “supermatter”: once switched on, all attention turns to them,

and their material qualities are demoted to the status of package or container as

the viewer searches for the real content, information.

7. Electroclimates became a “pillow.”

Electroclimates responds to local changes in the radio frequency environment

by switching itself on when it detects signals stronger than the general

background.

8. ... also provided an opportunity to test public receptivity to the idea of electronic

products for answering poetic needs.

9. But here the aim was not to convince an

audience of a need, but to draw them into a “what if . . .” scenario, a “valuefiction”

to stimulate a desire for change.

10. In some ways, Electroclimates “fails”: it is too seductive to be a “critical design”

in that the values it embodies are not strange enough.

11. I explored more design ideas: adhesive nipples that vibrated when they

sensed fields, warning the wearer to move back, seat backs with vibrating nodules

that indicated radiation was passing through the sitter, and parasitical

lights that only worked if positioned in fields emitted by domestic products.

12. This proposal is based on the realization, discussed in chapter 4, that electronic

products are “role models” and that when we use them we become the generic

user they are modeled on.

Thief of Affections started with my desire to design an object that embodied

an alternative model of a user, a “perverse” role model. This project is grounded

in perversity: not sexual perversion but the desire to rebel, to deny the system

the satisfaction of total conformism.

13. The project began to follow two lines of investigation: a technological investigation

of the “caress” and how “affection” could be stolen, and an exploration

of the physical nature of the “walkman.”

14. emphasizing the psychosocial narrative

possibilities of an electronic object as a role model (figures 7.11–7.12).

The strangeness of the behavioral model embodied in this proposal draws attention

to the fact that all electronic products embody models about behaviour

and it questions just how distinct our own identity is from those embodied in

the electronic objects we use.

15. Tuneable Cities investigates overlapping electromagnetic, urban (and natural)

environments. It uses the car as a found environment/object, the product designer’s

entry point into urbanism. With its built-in radio, telephone, navigator,

and even television, the car is already an interface between hertzian and

physical space.

16. My proposed object for presenting a non-electronic, radio-free volume would

use a faraday cage to show the ubiquitous nature of radio space and make perceptible

the absence of radio.

17. Their apparent unusability creates a heightened

sense of “distance.”

... Driven by poetry, imagination, and intuition rather than reason

and logic, they have their own sense, an alternative to our everyday scientificindustrial

one.