Project 03
For this project, Jinnie and I chose the following framework keywords:
- Topic: The Myth of Meritocracy
- Device: Absurd
- Attribute: Interactive
- Mood: Tantalising
Proposal
The project aims to visualize how meritocracy makes objectives feel within reach, claiming you need to do the work to achieve it, but oftentimes it was never really attainable. In contrast, nepotism makes these objectives be reached outside of the logics of meritocracy, to those in priviledge positions.
The object is a 'Secure Desk Pen', held by a string/ball chain and next to a contract. When you try to sign with it, the chain retracts, making it hard for you to actually achieve it. The main feature of it is, that is has a keyhole/padlock, implying those with the key could actually take the pen and sign without the struggle.
Project 02:
For this project we were tasked with the device of "Humor". To define our other cards we chose:
- Device: Humor
- Topic: Trust in AI
- Attribute: Disposable
- Mood: Nostalgic
Ideation session
Class workshop on making objects by modding/combining common ambiguous objects. My selected cards were:
- Topic: Deforestation
- Attributes: Connected & Responsive
I only had enough time to make one object, so I opted with the Connected attribute for it:
Speculatively, this is an object that lives in a future where climate change has led to a scarcity and quality of rainwater, causing deforestation to become so widespread that even flora in cities is affected. To mitigate this, citizens are obligated to carry these watering cans at all times. When these light up, they are a remote notification to water whatever plants are nearby. Notifications are managed by government offices keeping track of GPS location of the cans and optimizing city watering efforts based on that.
Project 01: Hungry Mind
For this project, we decided on the topic of "Attention Economy", and more specifically "Algorithmic Echo Chambers".
Taking Edible more metaphorically, we focused on the "Media Diet" and what a "balanced diet" would be, taking into account that its not really possible to have one.
The final idea was to build a TV dinner tray that, through a screen, would show content from reddit. These posts and comments would be grouped by the ideological stance of their subreddit (based on the database from this paper), into compartments, feeding into the idea of a balanced meal by appropriating the visual of separating nutritional groups.
The TV Dinner tray appeals to how media used to be consumed and in a way adapts it to how we consume media now.
