Glasgow School of Art
Innovation School
Product Design
In the first part of the Future Experience project, we had to work collectively and research on a chosen topic. We had to examine our domain, witch was Communicating Cancer, through the life-lenses of Social, Technological, Economic, Ecological, Educational, Political, Legal and Ethical. For this project, we were using new virtual tools as Mural, Padlet and Zoom. Theses tools have facilitated our communication between group members and tutors.
WEEK #1
We started by the creation of approximatively 10 STEEPLE card per group members.
We began to brainstorm all our ideas and research together on Mural and we decided to share the STEEPLE card topic between each fo us.
I focused my research on Technology. Our way to communicate has a very fast way to evolve. It is hard to follow between new artefact to communicate and new languages-like emoji-. In 2020, we are all focused and locked with our screen. The image is taking a lot of place in our society. I try to find projects that were represented a communication without the use of the image. Studio Tada is presenting a haptic fingernail that allows users to experience touch virtually. "Fulu" is a device that aims to bring touch into digital communication. To introduce touch to audio-visual interactions such as video calls and online gaming. At this stage of the research, I imagine that we could focus our 2030 society on a new way to communicate following these kinds of innovations to create a language focus on something else than the image it ton of voice.
After a couple of cards, we stopped our research and we put them in a timeline, which permits us to have a better view of the evolution of our ideas in a post and after Covid world. We really wanted to represent this break with Covid-19. Covid-19 change a lot of Social, Economic, Politics, Ethical, the perspective of view in our society in 2020. It was very important to represent that in our social evolution to 2020 to 2030.
The workshop with the AndThen studio was amazing, They had a very efficient organisation, clear presentations, very helpful comments and activities. They taught us a lot and we were able to move us forward quickly, the number of new tools impressed me now at my disposal to think about and advance a speculative design process.
They taught us to build a future scenario thanks to the line of consequences that are being constructed; if that happens, so that is going to happen and so that will happen. Thanks to it, we moved quickly and we start to draw a first draft idea of where we will conduct our society values.
WEEK #2
In the second week, we have participated in a second workshop with Brian Proudfoot.
Creating a mood board was very helpful, it trained us to put colours and sensations on values that we could only represent in words. The part that confused me was when we had to choose a specific scenario for this workshop to help us to develop the representation of our future world. I didn’t understand whether we should stay focused on this specific scenario for the rest of our project when at this stage I understood that we should remain as open as possible. I found that very restrictive and at the same time this workshop was very effective in making us move quickly and efficiently towards the design of 3D props. This workshop was also very effective in identifying the key values that we wanted to represent in this society of 2030.
The main idea we had was to represent a collective society, through empathy, sharing, planet and human social values. We wanted to place Collective intelligence as the main value. Collective intelligence is the action to connect people together, data together and people to data. For my group, a society that wants to be collective and has a participatory main focus, it was very important to explain that CI was the DNA of our world.
The day with the first expert's input day was very intense. It was like speed dating with scientists, each sharp in their fields. You had to do the best of your time, it was impressive and a huge chance.
The first thing we learned was to have to develop a new way of communicating with these people. We had to use simpler and different words than we usually do. We had to adapt our current designer language for scientists. Like them, we knew how to adapt theirs. The second thing is how best to prepare for this kind of interview. I was, but not enough to get the best out of it. The third thing was that these experts are not our clients, not our tutors, we must not meet their expectations but together create interactive exchanges to learn with them and enrich our research.
At this stage, we were presenting some ideas and values to them. We explain one of our main focus, that was a language to recognize emotion and to explain them through colour and democratisation of cancer, we wanted to create a new way to approach death and the fear of it.
Jude Robinson supports our idea saying "we are not very good talking about death" in our customs. She also explains to us that we ad some "diversity issue" in our society representation and we needed other families types. We talk also about graphical representation for children that are also working very well for adults in very stressful situations. She recommends us to look as those representation to take inspiration for colours or shape.
Angela Bruce spoke with us about our colours choice. Because at this moment we were focused on a discussion between children and his parents, so she told us that maybe our colour choice, seen by our young adult lens will be not the same for a child. We had to be careful with those choices.
WEEK #3
In 2030, we imagine our society based on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is the
new DNA of our society, based on sharing, human contact, openness and empathy. The world
has a new approach to death and cancer. People have a new approach to their emotions
and they are using new ways to communicate through their emotions. We have chosen to
represent this world in an abstract way to represent a way of communicating that evolves
beyond words and speech. We imagine people with cancer going through the disease with new systems of immersion and expression.
The third week was complicated at the beginning because the Internet connections were weak and we did not understand each other with my group. We then decided to see each other for real while respecting the safety distances. It was a real relief, it was liberating to be able to see them in front of me without crackles or network cuts. We were much more productive and responsive together. Unfortunately Calum could not come because he was far from Glasgow.
Thanks to Maria we discovered the Adobe portfolio platform that is simple and interactive and allows us to play with many different aspects of interactions.
In this exhibition we have tried to combine as many elements of a different nature as possible to create greater diversity and depth in the communication of our ideas.
We chose to display our world on a website to create
an interactive navigation in our emotional society.
During this first part of the project, I realized how precious and rich the group projects are. And how much I love collaborative design. I learned a lot about collective intelligence, cancer, and the history of communication. As with every project since my first year, I am learning to communicate my ideas verbally better and better in English.
The final creation of our website and its presentation made me want to push it even further. Bob's participation on Friday was invaluable as this commentary was placed under the lens of a spectator and not a professor. All the feedback, for our tutors or from our peer group was very helpful. For the further development of this project we are going to review our exhibition in a more explicit form of our ideas, by creating a more guided site visit.
This project changes my vision of cancer and makes me grow in the face of my fears and my emotions.
Social values video
Devolpement of the website.
We started by reviewing the organization of the site on the first page and we added an interactive color background to have depth on the home page. We also have an explanatory page on our company and our values. This page is useful for us so that our project can live on its own and we do not need to present it. The biggest part of the development of this project was on the imagination of the life of this exhibition in a post covid pandemic context.
MOVING FORWARD
For the development of our exhibition we decide to imagine it as an installation in-situ.
Since the beginning, we drove our researches around the evolution of medium of communication. Nowadays, we are surrounding by screens, TV, laptops, smartphones, etc. We wanted to represent thought this installation, in 2030, the past, the present and a reflection on the future of medium of communications. Some artists like Nam Jun Paik or Bill viola are using screen to express their works. Nam Jun Paik is an artist from south Chorea. He was considered of the first video artist. His various experiments positioned video as a variable art form. His revolutionary practice laid the groundwork for today’s artists working in new media. A keen desire to humanize technology underlines all his work. He incites reflection on both our relationship with technology and affect on, and benefits for, modern man. In our society in 2030, we wanted to take a step beyond screen and word based language. We wanted to create new ways of communication through abstract representations. The choice to install TV screens in a room to represent this was a way to be critical on the past and let start to a reflection on now and the future.
Bill Viola approaches videos in terms of signal and not images. In the development of his reflection on his artistic practice, he comes to consider equally the human perceptual system and his technological installations; it is a transition towards taking the spectator into account. Bill Viola designs his installations as spaces in which spectators are invited to immerse themselves in order to feel his emotions. It is for this purpose that we also wanted to use this superposition of images to include the viewer in our society based on collective intelligence and a new form of languages based on the senses and emotions. Further more we decide to choose one predominant colour, the purple. The purple colour, in different cultures like in India, is viewed as a spiritual colour. The passage from the earthly field to the spiritual field, but it also refers to the use of hallucinogen, which allows one to leave the state of consciousness to be transported to another space. We found it interesting from the lighting and the presentation of the installation to use this colour to assume in the viewer's unconscious journey to our image of 2030. The desired impact was to create to our audience a personal reflection on their own relation with technology, cancer and communication. In the development of our researches we focused on immersive environment as immersive game as for example “that dragon, cancer” that we used to represent one of our near future STEPPL cards. It is an immersive narrative video game that represents faith, hope and love. We believe that immersive environment are a effective way to transport audience in a direct reflexion of the values of our society and the critical approach we have with past and present ways to communicate.
Website trailer