Week 3 - “In my feels”
Continuing our research into Tube Crushes, Izzy, Sarthak and I went to the Tube for observational research. One insight I gathered was the difficulty in interpreting non-verbal gestures. Is someone glancing due to interest or boredom? Intentional or accidental? Without asking people, who might not even be aware of their body language, it’s presumptive to conclude any intent.
We also noticed widespread efforts to separate oneself from the environment. Most passengers wore headphones and sat in silence looking at their phones. This is counterintuitive to facilitating human connection. People actively block out their surroundings, possibly missing out on moments of pleasure.
↑ We took the Tube from Elephant & Castle to Clapham Common and back. Importantly, it was 2pm, which meant it wasn’t during peak hours, therefore the trains weren’t very crowded.
In addition to the observations, we conducted a Creative Toolkit exercise. Providing participants with a colour-changing light, music, and colouring pens, asking them to use it to externalise their brains during a Tube Crush experience. Whilst the outcomes varied visually, the activity reawakened participants’ senses and emotions, similarly to the insight Izzy and I observed in our first Directed Storytelling session. Due to convenience sampling, all participants were MAUX students. Whilst they were from different brief groups, a wider selection of participants would likely have provided fresh and different perspectives.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) note that embodied metaphors often help us make sense of abstract concepts. For example, romantic excitement can be likened to “butterflies in the stomach”. Using Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model, we recognised the challenge of communicating via visual language as meanings shift across viewers. This is evident in the results of this exercise which are highly individual and up for interpretation. With that being said, we also wanted to refrain from recreating literal visual representations of commonplace expressions of love (hearts, pink and red, etc).
↑ Creative Toolkit process and the creations made by the participants
↑ Participants’ explanations
↑ Creative Toolkit set up
With a strong foundation of research, we decided to move onto the ideation phase. I generated four “How Might We” questions, which we used for a Crazy 8s activity.
One idea Sarthak suggested, a vending machine for brain activity memories, stood out to us. The concept was a booth that scans a user’s brain and prints a receipt showing their brain activity.
However, we had two major issues: first, the idea of constructing a big booth on a Tube platform seemed quite unfeasible. Second, the brief explicitly challenges us to understand brain activity without relying on the appropriate technology. With that being said, the Crazy 8s ideas we generated helped us pinpoint our group’s interest in making brain activity interactive (rather than just visual or tangible), as well as serving a purpose of fostering human connection.
Steph Singer, our associate lecturer, advised us to make our idea within an extremely limited timeframe to uncover the core “ingredients” within this idea, testing out its potential and expanding upon that.
↑ Timing one minute for each pane, we noted down 4 ideas for each statement, generating a great number of ideas in a short amount of time. This also helped us see which directions we naturally gravitate towards.
↑ Visualising the “Crazy” idea direction we liked (credit: ChatGPT).
References:
Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/Decoding. In Crime and media (pp. 44-55). Routledge.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.