Nora and Torvald (exhibition)

'Nora & Torvald'
By rootoftwo (John Marshall and Cezanne Charles)
Birch plywood, Arduino micro-controllers, sensors, speakers, audio.
'Nora & Torvald' embeds sensor-controlled digital media in custom-designed pieces of furniture. The starting point of this work is a re-reading of Henrik Ibsen's play "A Doll's House" (1879) to explore user-object relationships.

There is a photocell embedded in the seat of the armchair 'Torvald'. This sends a message when it registers darkness (i.e. when someone sits down). This triggers a randomly selected line of dialogue (one of ten) from the play to be played as audio. There is an accelerometer in the rocking stool 'Nora'. When she is rocked this triggers a randomly selected line of her dialogue (also one of ten) to be played as audio.

A&D 5th Annual Faculty Exhibition, Slusser Gallery, 2000 Bonisteel Blvd. 1st floor.

'Nora' and 'Torvald' both use the Adafruit Wave Shield for Arduino Kit.

Sample dialogue (when 2 people are sitting):

T: This time I needn't sit here and be dull all alone. You have just come at a fortunate moment.
N: It's wonderful! Wonderful things don't happen every day. Take this armchair; I will sit here in the rocking-chair.
T: Has anyone been here?
N: What a thoughtless creature I am, chattering away like this.
T: You can depend on me.
N: It will make me so happy to be of some use to you.
T: Don't disturb me. Look straight at me.
N: I am in a silly mood today. Come and sit down here, and I will show you something.
T: How unreasonable and how ungrateful you are. What sort of madness is this! Can you not understand your place in your own home?
N: What do you want of me? Have you been sitting here waiting for me?
T: I may as well tell you plainly, we were once on very intimate terms with one another.
N: You don't understand me, and I have never understood you either.
T: Explain yourself better. I don't understand you. Can I never be anything more than a stranger to you?
N: You must simply listen to what I say. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you.
T: You are right, it has affected us both. Something ugly has come between us. Where are you going?
N: Isn't there one thing that strikes you as strange in our sitting here like this.
T: Here you shall stay and give me an explanation.
N: Does it not occur to you that this is the first time we two… have had a serious conversation?
T: On the contrary, I feel extraordinarily lively. And you? You really look both tired and sleepy.

Sharing Pillow by Rui Mu

Sharing-Pillow from Rui Mu on Vimeo.

Rui Mu is an MFA student at the University of Michigan's School of Art & Design. She has been exploring how product design can influence the behavior of users. This is what she says of a recent project:

"In 1979, a ‘one child policy’ was introduced to solve the problem of over-population in China. By 2007, there were approximately 100 million only-children in the country. This has had a great effect on Chinese economic reform. However, it has also introduced new problems such as an increase in selfish behavior that children have. This is currently resulting in a highly increased divorce rate in recent Chinese society since many of them are young adults.

Therefore, I have been exploring the didactic potential that product design has in changing selfish behavior by designing products that only function by being shared. I have designed an inflatable two-person pillow, which cannot be used comfortably without a partner. If one partner tries to use it, all the air will be pushed into the other half of the pillow and will provide him/her with no support. This product will not let one partner be lazy while the other one is working to encourage them to share housework fairly. In addition to changing couples’ behaviors, this pillow also improves their relationship by letting them use it together and spending more time with each other."

rootoftwo @ Chain Reaction (event)

After weeks of work (and a lot of sleep-deprivation) our piece 'et dukkehjem' is on its way to Macedonia for the 3rd Upgrade! International Gathering in Skopje, from September 11-14th, 2008. This event takes the form of a city-wide digital art and networked culture festival including exhibitions, screenings, live local and streamed performances and a program of lectures and workshops from over 20 cities across the world. The thematic focus 'Chain Reaction' explores issues of cultural development and growth in the local region as well as within digital networks. rootoftwo will also present a lecture titled 'The Tao of P.O.O (Post-optimal Objects)' at European University in Skopje. Now we just need to finish the project website...

EMF Dog Helmet (POO)

Another Post-Optimal Object from Rob Knecht. The EMF protective dog helmet is designed for family canines that may be susceptible to prolonged exposure of Electromagnetic Fields. Wireless networking, electrical appliances, and in home wiring may inhibit your pet's health. The helmet is constructed from fiberglass and EMF shielding fabric to prevent any stray magnetic fields from reaching your dog's brain. A nylon collar is fitted with a EMF detector to alert the pet owner of any dangerous EMF fields.

Post-Optimal Objects (POO) 3

The final project for Post-Optimal Objects (POO) at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design was to design a placebo object for a real or imagined, physical or psychological phobia that would challenge our expectations and preconceptions and provoke new ways of thinking about designed objects and how we use them. Class participants were asked to explore the complexity of how designed objects can modify our behavior by addressing needs that raise questions rather than just be practical, ergonomic or aesthetically pleasing (this project was shamelessly based on the 'Complicated Pleasures' project at the RCA). These objects were not to solve a problem but rather to enable the needs of the user (as the class participants defined them). The objects were presented with supporting materials to allow the audience to understand the relationship between the object and its user in different social contexts.

“By taking the meanings of others as a fundamental starting point for design, designers must proceed from their understanding of users' understanding, which is understanding of understanding or second-order understanding, and this is a way of knowing wholly different from ordinary (first-order) understanding of things”. (Krippendorff, 1995).

Most conventional products are designed with an idealized user in mind. A placebo is the term applied by medical science to the therapeutic and healing effects of inert medicines (i.e. preparations that are pharmacologically inert but that may have a therapeutic effects based solely on the power of suggestion). The purpose of the project was to explore a way of designing that acknowledges human complexity, contradiction and irrationality and transcends simplistic design characterizations of people as simply ‘users’ and ‘consumers’.

Some examples:

Separation Anxiety Disorder Placebo by Alex Sobolev. This was a Structuralist analysis of the Alfred Hitchcock movie 'Psycho'. The placebo object was a mental girlfriend for Norman Bates (that had killed her own Father who was himself dating Norman's dead Mother, or something like that). We are assured that had this condition existed it would have been a much shorter movie with no deaths.


“De vrees om te zijn niet Duch” (The fear of being non-Dutch) by Andy Sell. Those who experience a sense of dissatisfaction in knowing that they do not come from Dutch origin periodically suffer from Nonneederlandobia. The fear of being non-Dutch addresses a social dilemma of individuals whose work, interests and way of life lies parallel with Dutch culture, yet their lack of Dutch nationality disables them to fully identify as such. A a series of designed objects with the intent of making oneself “feel” more Dutch.


Keno-phobic Sound Generation Device by Rob Knecht. Keno-phobia is an abnormal fear of large, empty spaces. This is a synthesizer and sequencer that analyzes the current environment and generates a musical composition for the individual to enjoy and share.

Post-Optimal Objects (POO) 2

As already indicated, this semester at University of Michigan School of Art & Design I am teaching an elective studio course: (ArtDes 300.015) Post-Optimal Objects (POO). This course focuses on designed objects and their cultural contexts. The current project is a Chindogu Challenge:

“Chindogu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, Chindogu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, Chindogu are sometimes described as 'unuseless' – that is, they cannot be regarded as 'useless' in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called 'useful'.” (From Wikipedia).

This project has an additional parameter that participants should make one component part of their Chindogu object that starts out digital and becomes physical (i.e. make use of laser cutting, cnc milling or rapid prototyping).

Lilienne Chan's pant hem saving system.

Andy Sell's laser cut, totally biodegradable collar for urban environments with heirloom seeds embedded in it.

Isaac Krauss's food spill saving device.

Devon Russell's anti booger freeze device.

Ronen Goldstein's Open Source beardguard.

A spin off of this project is Alex Sobolev's (pictured above with his toilet seat for public restrooms) new blog 'Chindogu or Not?' that is a placeholder for a future site http://www.un-useless.com/

Soup Pipe

More from the Post-Optimal Objects class: this time its a soup pipe (a pipe for eating soup out of - sometimes referred to incorrectly as a soup bong). This is another project by Robert Lester. The intention is to make a mold and slip cast them. Watch this space...

Update - in the picture above you can see a biscuit-fired soup pipe and some patterns for mold making. Below you can see a finished, glazed soup pipe.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe pour la soupe!

Post-Optimal Objects (POO)

This semester at University of Michigan School of Art & Design I am teaching an elective studio course: (ArtDes 300.015) Post-Optimal Objects (POO). This course focuses on designed objects and their cultural contexts. The class participants are exploring the territory between fine art and design and addressing approaches for developing the aesthetic and critical possibilities of objects outside a commercial context. Participants are also investigating various ways of creatively communicating ideas about objects, such as making appearance models, mock-ups and storyboards. The creative works made in Post-Optimal Objects will be shown as prototypes or communicated via publication (online or print). Participants are thinking conceptually about what they want to achieve, translating these ideas into visualizations, and developing some of these into fully executed and documented works. Digital 3D modeling, scanning, laser cutting, and rapid prototyping can be used together with traditional media such as wood, metal, and plastics.

We started the course with Product 2.0: Design Yoga - a couple of quick projects to introduce the themes of the studio and to establish a number of generative brainstorming techniques. The first exercise involved the Critical Browsing of a list of practitioners’ websites that could be considered to be producers of Post-Optimal Objects. The purpose of this was to identify some characteristics of what might constitute a Post-Optimal Object. The goal was to come up with a working definition of what a Post-Optimal Object could be. This resulted in a Post-Optimal Mindmap.

Next, we generated some Random Products using manual and online generators for wacky product ideas. We spent some time playing with these tools to come up with some interesting textual descriptions/titles of Post-Optimal Objects and developed short statements that contained an outline of a situation, context, problem, need or opportunity that each of these objects addresses. From online image-hosting sites we found images for each of these 'objects'. These images were not necessarily representative of what the objects were but characterized the values or intentions that might support the objects that participants had come up with. The combinations of the description/title of the object, short statements and images were then shown as presentations.

Examples:Soni-Pill® - these easy to swallow little pills actually prove that your internal body movements have a music of their own! Just take one of these tiny, FDA approved pills, turn on your Bluetooth-compatible computer and be amazed as they convert your digestive habits into melodious music to your ears! The music changes with your diet and their position in your digestive tract! Pills stay in your system for approx. 1 day, then come out the other end for easy disposal in your toilet. Safe for flushing! (By Robert Lester).

Random words: bubbles, robots, iron lungs.
An iron lung meant for kids that provides entertainment as well. Every time with then child takes a so-called 'breath', the machine emits bubbles of varying colors, shapes and sizes. Keeps the child alive, keeps you happy and gives you a reason to stay by their bedside to visit until they are better. A critique on the willingness of people to visit their hospitalized loved ones over time. (By Lilienne Chan).

The first full project was a Product Autopsy. The aim of this project was to gain an understanding of and to re-conceive a product through its dissection and reconstruction. The goal was to uncover the Post-Optimal potential of an existing object by conducting a Post-Mortem on a disposed-of designed object. Participants explored how materials, manufacturing techniques, systems and values are brought together in their chosen objects by taking this product apart systematically and documenting this process. Once the object had been dissected and its function and design had been analyzed the task was to re-make the object in a manner that is ‘emotionally-durable’.

“In their current guise, consumer products lack the sophistication and layered complexity for this degree of long-term empathy to incubate. Most consumer products relinquish their tenuous meaning to a single fleeting glance, while rarely delivering any of the life-altering rewards they so confidently promise. In this respect, waste is nothing more than symptomatic of a failed user/object relationship, where insufficient empathy led to the perfunctory dumping of one by the other.”

“… designers must first increase the intensity and perceptibility of subject-object dependency, enabling products to achieve deeper and more immersive modes of prolonged user engagement. This can be achieved in numerous ways: but if the simulation is not genuine, it will be cast off by the user as gadgetry or a deceiving quirk. The illusion of dependency is therefore insufficient; we must conceive products that actually depend upon users and genuinely need our emotional and physical support in order to survive - facilitating the creation of authentic and meaningful interactive experiences that go beyond the virtual, toward the actual.”

“It is therefore essential to avoid the notion of industrial design objects as static in meaning and appreciate that, like paintings and literary works, the meanings evolve over time.”

From: CHAPMAN, J., 2005. Emotionally durable design: objects, experiences and empathy. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.

Example:


(By Devon Russell).