Design Studio Term 2¶
Assignment: An updated version of your design space. A 500 word text with a summary of your journey so far, adding the repositioning of yourself and your project. Make explicit new project goals and next steps including a proposal for the 1st intervention of the second trimester (a draft will be discussed during the design reviews the week after).
Adapted from Thesis Draft: Intervention: Altered States/ AUgmented Creativity for non human collaboration
For the collective intervention around the question ”How do we use Altered/Augmented states to design from a non-human perspective ?” We had designed a small intervention in the Motion Capture (MOCAP) room at Elisava. A few in the group are interested in water as the non human entity, so we designed a protocol that hopes to decenter the human and bring them more towards a water state of mind.
The protocol consisted of several steps: 1: Set the space: we filled the space with a music elaborated by Endel Sounds, they are rhythms created in collaboration between scientists and musicians to provoke various states of mind - from relaxed, to focused or even sleepy. We also flashed a video of jellyfish on a wall (the MOCAP room is not particularly inviting but we wanted to capture the movement of people through space and see if any useful information came up). Flashing a video helped make the space more inviting and evoke a water visual. 2: Drink tea : We hope this action would connect the human to the sound of water being poured, the fluidity of that experience, and the fact that our body is largely made of water. The tea was also made of relaxing herbs, and specifically designed to relax the body and mind for a smoother easing into the experience. It was served in a ritualistic way, in silence, or with prompts to help people be present to the various sensations of the pouring (inspired by tea ceremony rituals). 3: BreathWork + Movement: We invited participants to take deep breaths, relax in to the space, and then get up and move their body in ways that felt right. For many people this is a difficult exercise. We felt it might help people inhabit the space more, and ease the into the next step of the protocol. 4: Moving along a meaning grid: We had mapped 4 corners of the room with different meanings (Human - Non Human and Fluid - Stagnant) and asked participants to freely move around the room grid whilst listening to a poem that evoked water and it different forms and cycles. This is what we hoped to capture with the MOCAP devices.
I was the one facilitating this protocol which was intimidating. It was part of the mistakes we made. Though at this stage we had no other option, I am not a trained facilitator and I did not have the deep confidence to lead others into the experience with perfect timings and flow that trained experts might. I moved too quickly through the various steps and as a result the experience felt short, and some participants were less able to “decenter”. The other crucial mistake we made was not to ask anything of our participants after. the experience. We asked them to write their feelings, but we should have asked them to design with us around a specific question related to water. The grid was also ultimately not successful as it was too intellectual an exercise and kept participants in their mind rather than in their body which instinctually feels like the better space for non-human relating. This question of altered states and using them for design explorations is fascinating to me and I look forward to diving deeper into it next term. Refining the protocol, creating new protocols for each species, understand “ritual design” and the essence and purpose of various steps to bring on a certain state of mind. Working with all the senses and even various nootropics.
Going forward we’d like to test more protocols in different settings. It might be able to join the Biodesign Dinners project and propose a pre-dinner protocol for facilitating critical thinking around the dinner table about a specific topic. Likely the Sea/Mediterranean.