Emily Tutorial Notes - 9/12

Looking at tactile Instagram accounts - the word ‘satisfying’ keeps coming up, as a name or hashtag
All related to a liquid matter, change in matter through a process

Like the idea of ones you can do at home, linking to craft/process theme

Large amount of likes, building a subculture

Audience may or may not be from the creative industry, the general public

Key point is they're watching it on a screen instead of doing it themselves at home

Got suggested/on my explore page

A generation of watching something that provides a satisfying feeling without touching

All strangely similar

Screen vs tactile is interesting contrast

What are you going to do with them?

What is the point of these, what do you want to get out of them?

A lot of people don't have these craft like tactile experiences anymore because it fills a gap

What is your method of research going to be?

You know it’s going to be a series of physical experiments - how am I going to get those results

Ideas - alternative touch screens, using glass, thinking about curves and braille.

Then creating something bigger in scale - possibly in the future

Things that are reactive, something softer, light reactive inflatables!

An experience that’s able to connect people - instead of here’s an alternative to a touch screen but you’re still alone, there’s still this issue of solitude

Interesting issues of being alone with technologies. (Sherry Turkle)

Tension between flat screen and materiality

The overall in a sentence - the degradation of experiences due to flat screens

Degrading memories, anecdotal, nostalgia

I believe the solution is to find a way to bring people together and see all tech as negative because its always going to exist compared to sherry - how is my take different to hers?

Instead of just getting rid of it, taking it out of our lives, what are you proposing?

I think I’m proposing to create something that gives people a realisation of how attached and dependant we are to our devices? I’m looking at a real social issue but I don’t want to create something that feels negative because I dont think that proposes a solution.

'Slowing-down technologies'

Something that doesnt use something digital

Alters the affects in your brain compared to the alertness created from digital devices

The question with your work is do you want to make work that nourishes those things or do you want to propose a different way of being.

Finding a way to get sensors to work through a bell jar - I feel like it provides a different experience, diff connection, tactile/textural data, the way you handle something, going back to the craft element and tacit knowledge. Think about what you could do with the surface other than curving it. Cuts wouldn't work because they're permanent, the point of touch screens is that theyre universally dynamic, how do you propose to solve that issue? Would need to be more targeted towards a specific purpose.

So its not necessarily serving any functions in terms of a screen being a portal to interactions and information but to prompt thinking on part of the user about their relationship with their device/the screen.

The idea of the window, when you bring glass into it in different ways.

Just get sensors to react between glass, works through the glass interface first and foremost

Soft idea - the same sensor idea but placed in a softer object, prompts you to question your sense of touch etc

I feel the glass would evoke a stronger meaning to the user simply because of our current relationship with glass. As well as the historical relationship to glass, it is the medium through which we consume things, think of the display window, ideas about the self and the looking glass. All these ideas and reasons to play with this medium. Seeing, understanding, a conduit for knowledge. With a normal touch screen you have the screen itself and the content that it’s showing, as well was what you’re seeing and what you’re doing from it.

Instagram has to do with the acquisition of knowledge

You’re still writing about issues with accessing information so in a lot of ways that’s still going to guide the research.

You’re dealing with the objects we use to access information, so that in some ways is going to guide your exploration of the content.

Insta videos are about a lack of information, if we gather info through our hands and fingertips we could argue that we experience a lack of sensory information because we don’t engage with those substances all the time. It’s an imperfect way of making up for it but it really points to a lack of information overall.

You are exploring a lack of information.

Is it knowledge or info once again?

Consider how we generate knowledge for ourselves.

Craft Knowledge!

People can generate craft knowledge that you can't necessarily articulate the way we can with other type of knowledge as it is generated entirely through kinetic processes and sensory processes and through making and doing itself.

This idea of the workmanship of certainty - machines, no human error

vs workmanship of risk - hand craft where you don’t know about the outcome

Thinking through the hands

Communicating through making instead of speaking or instructions - Michael Polyanyi

What can you do with Glass? Interactivity-wise?