Ux of the Present

Asli Ates

Anwesha Basu

Izzy O’connor

Emelia

Prim Adam

Chen Wang (Shaye)

When given the brief ( Design an implement for modifying the present) I had ideas of looking into Acceloratorism, time blindness and sensory things around you that draw your attention to the present, such as foil hanging off the walls of a corridor that rustles with your movement. Meditation and how money can give you more time because of not having to use public transport or use things that don’t work well. We were given Speed dating (quick fire idea pitching) and Data physicalisation (making data 3as research methods. We particularly were drawn to ways of recentering people’s perception of time to the present as an anticapitalist move but then went with the idea of daydreaming being a redefinition of the present.

We researched a lot into psychological perspectives of daydreaming, and most of us found there were three main daydream types: guilty dysphoric, anxiety and depressive symptoms, positive, constructive, positive visualisation and problem solving and poor attentional control, mind wandering and most often forgetful. Guilty dysphoric was unproven, whether it was a symptom or a cause of low mood. The positive constructive type is proven to increase creativity and positive mood; I was most interested in this and ways of turning guilty dysphoric to positive constructive. Poor attentional control seemed least knowable or controllable, seeing as people would forget them and couldn’t control them. (McMillan et al., 2013; Singer, 1966a; Singer, 1966b; Singer and Antrobus, 1966). This behaviour was then split into maladaptive and adaptive (Soffer-Dudek, N. and Somer, E., 2018.) So, from these findings, we created our data physicalisation, making percentages of the Play-Doh symbols. We struggled to work out how best to visualise the information and failed to connect the fact that this research method is best at relating multiple strands of information to see the interrelationships between the findings or potential gaps in the studies. We kept running into what we thought were dead ends due to lack of information because what we most wanted was more of an overview of cross-study information, which was, of course, not possible, and we quickly realised that these studies were not ideal to visualise due to the qualitative findings of most psychological studies and gaps/restrictions in information due to the scientific method of limiting test parameters to single items of study. After visualising the data, we were asked to do our own first-hand research to test these studies further. Further reading was Virginia Woolf’s tunnelling process and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.

We then took our playdoh symbols to the cafeteria to ask LCC students to tell us what kind of percentages they would rank their own daydreams, the data was very different however we did note that arts university students were more likely to have a more creative imagination and therefor more likely to be out of the ordinary. From these findings, we brainstormed ideas together to create our speed-dating pitches. When presenting to our three external participants, we got some interesting feedback that changed some of our views on what to make; we then incorporated some of that feedback into our design. We created a portal into a daydream. Taking the top daydream subject, ‘an ideal sense of self’ as the main thing to be visualized, we created a black pool of water in which you could clearly see your reflection on a table. It was surrounded by ethereal-looking drapes, allowing you to separate yourself from the outside world; a slow drip of water falls down into the water, creating a meditative, hypnotic water ripple to help facilitate a transportive state of mind. We also played audio made up of ambient sound taken from all the locations where the participants reported that they daydream the most. i.e. the shower, transport, and lectures.