SUSANNA HERTRICH

MA student Design Interactions RCA

2006-2008

DESIGN INTERACTIONS

complicated pleasures

Walk on the wild side

Brief: Complicated pleasures

The purpose of the project is to explore a way of designing what acknowledges peoples’ complexities, contradictions, and irrationality and to go beyond simplistic design characterisations of people as ›users‹ and "consumers".

People and their inner evil self

Everybody has a hidden evil self inside, which is exactly that a part of their personality, people like to deny. A very common scenario for the inner evil self to come up is e.g. the lone drive at night on the motorway, where the next bridge seems just so inviting to crash into ... and who hadn't thought throwing oneself or a person nearby in front of the approaching train?
The fear or the pleasure of the encounter of the inner evil self is based on the idea of maybe not being able to keep up with the trained self-control. The inner evil self lets people dream about doing things, that are totally catastrophic, socially disastrous or simply self-destructive in a "normal" everyday situation.

Parallel world of constant catastrophe

In my scenario, I imagine the existence of a parallel world of constant catastrophe, in which the inner evil self does all the things people hardly ever dare to think about. I have designed a service, which provides people with the opportunity to a catch glimpse of that parallel world from time to time, to be able to feel the tickle of playing with inapproriate thoughts — and thus to embrace their inner evil selves.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

Walk on the wild side invites people to trigger their inner evil self by carrying a small device. The device as such is a placebo. Its functions are only symbolic. The device may elicit totally different ideas of catastrophic scenarios for each person.

Materials

The device consists of a tin with a lid, a mirror and a 7-segment LED digit. The mirror is placed inside the tin. Behind it sits the 7-segment LED digit, which is connected to a BasicStamp chip. The digit is program-med to be a counter. It counts down from 9 to 0.

Function

The counter may or may not start to run, when the lid is removed. Thus the device runs in an unpredictable manner, which makes it impossible to prepare for a walk on the wild side. If the counter starts to run, people have about 30 seconds to decide whether to perform or not to perform a totally inappropriate and socially catastrophic or suicidal action. The metaphor of counter is borrowed from the idea of self-destructing mechanisms, known from various James Bond movies. The mirror inside confronts people with the view of their official "stable self" – in contrast to their inner evil self that just awakened.