Festival Visuals

It's winter now which makes it hard to imagine what summer and festivals feels like. Some pictures might help.

Remote Speaker

Had to post this one too. This gives people an opportunity to express meanings public without the embarrassing attention of the speakers corner, yet it delivers the message in a more "old-school" way than lets say a sms-chat on a big screen i.e. 

I like the materiality of this installation because I fear that introducing to many digital devices like screens and graphic interfaces will inflict the festival-feeling in some way. Done in a nice way I think it can be a nice translation from digital to analog media.

Memory Wall

Here is a good example of a relatively simple interactive installation which I guess gives added value to the social experience of a festival. Could be something to look to if we work further with gossip- or the sharing-ideas.

A hint

Due to our next direction in the project working with a 'hide and seek'-concept, I found the Spy-on-yourself Beauty Mirror interessting. Giving people at the festival hints on where they are, how they look and so on. 

Iteration Three - Platform for prototypes

Our first approach to the festival project is to regard the festival as an area that we can place different RFID devices into. Our thought is that every guest has a tag and this can in some way be registred by readers in different areas of the festival. You will get a feedback on each reader device but there will also be a feedback based on the network of readers that communicate with eachother, reflecting the activities of the tags.

So there are two layers of interactivity/feedback. The personal interaction with immediate feedback, and the "part of the big picture"-feedback that maybe is generated over time. So far these are just loose ideas but for the Arduino workshop we may want to investigate:

-how different readers can communicate with eachother?

-what is the difference between personal and common touch? 

Festival Feeling

"Hei jeg er på festival, jeg er klar for nye ting". 

Man krever ikke så mye på en festival. Den er veldig lite teknologisk. Den er jord, øl, skranglete band, blendende sol, krypende kveldskulde. Man går litt tilbake i tid nesten, til noe mer primitivt. (en venninne av meg sier hun begynner å jukse og juge) Man kler av seg den teknologiske drakten og selv IT-mannen bretter opp jeansen og føler seg kul. Når jeg tenker meg om synes jeg kontrasten mellom det primitive og teknologi er fengende. Og RFID kan passe veldig bra inn her fordi den er liksom så lydløs og lite spektakulær ( kommer selvfølgelig an på hva man designer rundt den men potensialet er hvertfall der) den er litt menneskelig om man ikke slenger på billige buzzere som lager kjipe lyder o.l.....

Iteration Two

Festivals

Finally we have decided the context of our project and it will be festivals. After evaluating our workshop and the ideas it generated we have found that many of them is about meeting new people, having fun and being social in a playful way within a defined context. We wanted to build on this and dicussed among others the two contexts of festivals or conferences. Festivals seems to be the most suitable for our task whereas we predict that working with the threshold and acceptance of implementing RFID into social settings will be one of our big challenges. On festivals people are probably more relaxed and open to try new things and the atmosphere is not too serious. 

Iteration One

Direction

For the direction in our project we have chosen the design breifs RFID and the everyday / Touch as culture and we probably should focus on who to;

-enhance peoples social life (physical world)

-explore peoples acceptance of touch in social context 

Reading up on blogs and RFID related sites we dicovered two interessting phenonemon ; Social objects / social life of objects

Social object is of a more abstract nature and can be said to be the shared ground of why interaction occurs . 

An example of such a common ground could be Thinglink.org.

Social life of objects could be relevant for us in this project because it is concerning the objects identity, history and ability to communicate. (BookCrossing)

"The interesting thing about Social Objects is not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them"  Hugh Macleod, Gapingvoid.

To sum it up we could say that we want to Work within a tangible, physical approach to social settings. 

Observations

It can be difficult to get a direction with such a broad term as social life. First we wanted to sketch out different kinds of social interaction and did some observations, without focusing of any ideas or solutions:

-give short/necassary information (slippery surface)

-read other peoples thoughts (man looking curiously)

-explore other social groups (ethnic mothers with children)

-let objects become personal (parked cars, only personal when owner is present)

-objects that sticks out (giant palm, subject for conversation)

-find things (Marianne got lost)

-help others (man struggling with “rullator”)

-decrease inhibition (children dancing in the fountain)

-borrow objects (man with umbrella)

-get recommendations (girl walking with tempting, newly-baked bread under arm)

-can garbage hold information (tax deduction card in the gutter)

-random meetings (someone slips on the bus, starts a conversation) 

-accidental touch (narrow sidewalk) 

-disorientation/fear (kid mistaking me for his father)

-peeking/view (looking into peoples home, ground floor)

-locating seats (entering a café)

-ear-dropping/scene (girl and boy in love, playing around a car)

Plan

Arrange a workshop (see older blog post)

-research of peoples networks 

-formulate a problem definition

-generate ideas in multiple directions

-investigate thresholds for social interaction web/physical (probe Facebook etc..)