UX OF DIRT

Aoqi Yuan

Sarthak Joshi

Sakshi

Rui Wang

Brief : make and embodied experience of dirt.

After brainstorming, again it was difficult to find a direction forward that was satisfactory to everyone. I really wanted to look at what we consider public and private in relation to the phrase ‘digging up the dirt’ on someone, or what culturally is viewed as dirty. I looked at Sophie Calle’s work where she would experiment with documenting herself and others at moments they didn’t know they were being observed. However we went with the majority of the group, presenting a board game to raise awareness about parasites. We wanted to come from a different angle and chose to examine the dual nature of mental health issues, which Tonisha rightly pointed out was a step too far in terms of an analogy. We then struggled to find a topic that was truly dirt and still utilising our area of interest to explore the positive and negative of life. We explored multiple areas to help us gain new insight into our main ideas, utilising the AEIOU method. Me and Sakshi visited the local dump, Camberwell Ceramics Studio which would give us an overview of the dirt we want to get rid of and the dirt that symbolises hard work and then wrote up our AEIOU with the group.

We also rewrote our love/breakup letter as a group to find a common direction, which helped. We ended up taking the phrase, ‘feeling dirty’ as something that can be experienced after being either physically dirty or having your boundaries crossed. We thought that this feeling of being uncomfortable was shame, so we then tried to do some artist/historical research on it. I read ‘So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (2015) and brought up the history of the stocks and Scold’s bridle (public humiliation and punishment), which led us to make a shame chair to embrace this feeling fully. Sarthak, Aoqui, and Rui were very good at creating this, with Sakshi and me assisting. However, once presented, it still was one step too far, as shame was really a subsequent feeling rather than the dirt in this situation.

After the feedback we took a step back and I pushed again for ritual design but with the added use of actual dirt as a metaphor for the emotion being cleansed. With the psychological backing in the befits of rituals, we then committed to this direction when Aoqi had the great idea of utilising ash which pushed the concept onto solid footing. She explained ash can clean impurities from metal. Ash also being dirt, this was a great concept, dirt being used to clean dirt, so the participant can focus on a mindful process while connecting it to the emotional discomfort they want to get rid in a nuanced way. Confronting traumatic situations and seeing them in a balanced way. We could have experimented more with the format/performance and given it to others to recreate so we could user test it. Next steps would be to test other iterations and ask for feeback from partipants.