The Void

A thesis by Lucy Knops

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Penelope

Penelope is an endless weaving loom. It is my final offering for Futuring and Speculative objects. This project was inspired by the ideas that were developed in the co-creative workshop I hosted. Penelope is a tools fostering structured nothing.

The rotation of this circular loom undoes your work as you weave, providing an endless cycle of weaving where your work is never completed. The function of Penelope is to provide a process, not a product.

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Speculating the Future

Earlier this semester I designed and hosted a co-creating workshop. With these simple tools, I asked 12 members of my target audience to speculate about how a cultural shift towards valuing absence would shape our daily lives in the future:

Participants were asked to create advertisements, in the form of collage, for services or products that might exist in future scenarios. 

Many incredible ideas came out of this session:

One idea in particular greatly influenced my final speculative project. The concept that came out of the co-creating session was titled Le Champ Immortel. It advertised a virtual field that users tend, to no end. Over time, users would improve their practice and build up an ability to stay increasingly longer tending the virtual field. This purpose of this practice is to ‘harvest the bounty of boredom.’ 

Thank you to Joan and Caleb for this beautiful, inspirational idea.

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Attention

My classmates and I were warned early on in our thesis process that we would encounter many rabbit holes.  My research has taken me in many directions and down some amazing rabbit holes. Some of these have been big, others small. Some fruitful, some less so. In one case, citing my research became a hunt down a rabbit hole itself. 

I came across the following quote in a presentation several months ago: 

"The quality and content of a person’s life is the sum total of what they have paid attention to over time.”

It was attributed to the author Henry James. When I looked into the quote further, to find out exactly in what context Henry James wrote it, I reached a dead end. After much hunting and some gracious sleuthing from others, it looks likely that William James, the psychologist, rather than Henry James the author is responsible for this quote. In William James’ The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 he writes, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

Here he is speaking to a similar point. We have a choice of where to focus our attention. When we think of all of the distractions that fill our days, the chatter (Das Gerade) Heidegger wrote of, it is important to be reminded that we do have this choice. I am yet to find a context where William James (or Henry James) wrote the exact quote that was originally so inspiring for me. Regardless, the sentiment is one that has carried through much of my work. 

I created this short video about attention.

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Structured Nothing in Action

At 9:00 pm on a Wednesday evening, I set out on a Brooklyn bound L train armed with bags of bubble wrapped tools for structured nothing. Over the course of one train ride I handed out 136. The results were pretty magical. You can see clips from the experience here:

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Structured Nothing

Do nothing more often.

Let your mind wander.

Structured nothing is the power of choice. It is the power to take the time, sometimes, to focus on nothing. The quality of our lives is the sum of what we pay attention to over time. When we shift our attention to doing nothing amazing things happen, our minds wander, we daydream, we come up with brilliant ideas. 

See what people have shared as their structured nothing here. Refresh the page to have your submission appear. 

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Experiencing Structured Nothing

This past week I went out and tested my structured nothing experience in public. Again, focusing on transitions, I chose to test my experience inside the New York City subway. I moved away from an initial idea of setting up a stationary booth of sorts where people could engage in structured nothing, and instead decided that the experience should happen on the move and have an ephemeral quality.

I made over 50 bubble wrapped surrogate phones and set out on a weekday evening. In this iteration, the phones simply had bubble wrap on one side and a hashtag on the back. I set out to test the logistics of the experience. The intention of the experience is to shift subway riders attention for just a moment and get them to actively focus on doing nothing, structured nothing.

Leading up to this test run, I had lost my excitement for the project and was questioning wether it was enough of an engagement. Pushing past my own self criticism and getting out to test with real people proved to be incredibly beneficial. I was able to see where there were gaps in the experience, but the biggest benefit was validating the value of the simple engagement.

The phones were successful in that people needed little to no instruction as to what to do with them. Bubble wrap is great, and people immediately want to pop the bubbles. Subway riders are generally hesitant to engage with or take anything being handed out on the train, but once people heard the sound of the popping following me down the train, and realized that I was not asking for anything in return, the vast majority were happy to take the phones and pop away. I even had one woman work her way through the car to catch up to me to thank me for giving making her realize she needed a little break.

Overall, it was a very successful test run. I now need to solidify my script for handing out the phone and for answering questions. I also have decisions to make in regards to feedback, deciding if there should be a call to action other than a hashtag.

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Absence Cont.

Considering how absence could be shared with a larger or public audience, I designed a series of collages to illustrate the mood of a user journey through an experience of absence. In urban settings, we are constantly bombarded with input and distraction. A simple intervention and experience has the potential to break through this bombardment, even if only for a brief minute of time. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, moments of transition are prime areas of opportunities for the work of my thesis. In considering a location for my experience, I have been looking to stops along people's daily commutes, such as subway platforms or cars, or bus stops. I created a brochure for my potential experience of absence. This brochure advertises an experience where a facilitator guides passersby through an activity that is intentionally 'boring' or absent of focused engagement. These are activities of structured nothing. 

In a conversation I had with Brian David Johnson, a writer and futurist at Intel, he used the term ‘structured nothing’ to describe moments where you intentionally do nothing. These can be taking a shower, staring out of the window, or going for a run to clear your head.

I have prototyped two possible structured nothing activities for this experience. Both are designed to take approximately one minute to complete. The first is a standardized test where there are no questions, allowing the participant to simply fill in answer bubbles. The second returns to my earlier prototype using surrogate phones. Participants are provided with a surrogate phone lined with bubble wrap. The bubble wrapped gives the participant a mindless activity to occupy their hands with for one minute while their mind wanders. 

This brings me up to date on the development of this project. My next steps are testing the prototypes of structured nothing in public where my final experience will take place. 

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Experiencing Absence

For the past few weeks I have been in development of a designed experience. This experience is centered around the concept of absence. The subtraction of just one element from an experience can heighten our senses and shift our attention to other elements of the experience. Starting back in September, at the beginning of this thesis year, I implemented a minute of silence at the beginning of every class session. The minute has received positive feedback from my classmates and instructors and has become a valued aspect of each class. The absence of sound for just one minute at the beginning of a class serves as a powerful transition from one part of our day to another.  

I have been exploring ways to spread this daily ritual to audiences outside of my program. An early prototype considered how one might gift a minute of silence to someone who is not present. Most of us have our phones on us at all times throughout the day. They can often be catalysts for distraction rather than value. These two qualities make the phone a prime opportunity for intervention. Monopolizing on the fact that most my friends typically respond to texts in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, I reached out to several people via text in order to gift them a minute of silence. The instructions were simple and the positive responses validated the concept and value of gifting a minute of silence.

In a next iteration, I turned again to my classmates as test subjects. I created surrogate phones, to the dimensions of each classmates make and model of smartphone. Each phone was wrapped as a gift and labeled with their names. The gift of a surrogate phone was presented as an exchange for setting their actual devices aside for the duration of one class period. This was an exercise in removing the distraction of one's phone during a time when one's attention should be on the experience at hand. Providing the physical surrogate served as comfort to alleviate some of the anxiety of being separated from one's device.

In building towards my larger designed experience, I next looked to the broader public as my audience. 

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A Boring History

This week I mapped out the history of boredom onto a timeline. I have been doing a lot of research on boredom and compiling key moments in its history into one graphic proved to be quite useful. Laying out key points helped me to clearly see shifts in language or perception around boredom. Boredom has historically been perceived as negative. It is only in the past decade or so, with the backing of scientific study, that boredom has shifted to be perceived as an active mind state, filled with positive potential. Boredom can push one into a state of mind wandering where creative moments occur. These are those ah ha moments that can happen in the shower. 

The timeline itself is a first draft. In class, I self-critiqued the timeline as a informational graphic. The relationship of where each event falls on the axis needs to be significantly adjusted and there are issues of consistency. I plan on fleshing out some of these details and on exploring other diagraming formats to map out the nuances of doing nothing. 

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Goals and Needs

I spent this past week writing about my goals and objectives. In short, the goal of my thesis is to create products and systems that cut through the distractions of everyday life in order to help individuals tap into their authentic selves. This is an admittedly conceptual and philosophical goal, but I believe that we have the ability to actively shape the quality of our lives and that design is a powerful tool to aid in this. 

For the purpose of this endeavor, I am taking the definition of 'authentic self' from German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's writings are dense but this great video from The School Of Life  explains his idea of the authentic self, and the chatter that blocks it, beautifully and concisely:

During a workshop this week I mapped the needs of one of my key users, The Regretful Consumer. 

Need: To curb her excessive consumption and distracting habits (ex. shopping and consumption of social media); wants to be more focused and simply happier

Context: City dweller with a busy professional and social life, is overwhelmed constantly trying to balance everything, will try any solution from yoga to juice cleanses but all of these add to their list of things to manage

Channels: Social media, radio/blogs such as WNYC, subway interventions

Factors: A behavior gap between their awareness of feeling overwhelmed and unsatisfied and their actual behaviors adding to the problem; scalability of solutions  

This exercise helped to clarify that my goals and objectives are in line with, but not the same as, the needs of my user personas. My goal is for my audience to help them tap into their authentic selves. The goal of the Regretful Consumer may be as simple as buying less stuff of deleting that one time-sucking app on their phone. I do think that by serving that need, users will be cutting through distraction and tapping into their authentic selfs, resulting in an overlap of my goals with their needs. 

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Instabored

This week I was challenged to create something that represents the work I intend to present based on the continuums I defined last week. The key intentions I'm trying to move towards are: Inclusive vs. Exclusive, Discover vs. Teach, Public vs. Private. 

Instabored is a poster I designed for the setting of public bathrooms. It aims to bring back boredom to the toilet. Instabored is a printed poster of the entire Instagram User Agreement. Even in 2012, 75% of Americans reported using their phones in the bathroom. Rather than distracting ourselves on our phones, Instabored provides an opportunity to rediscover boredom.

Boredom has become a key focus of my thesis and is even more on my mind this week because New Tech City, a technology podcast on WNYC, just yesterday launched their biggest project ever, Bored and Brilliant. Their project aims to get people to rethink their relationship with technology, (specifically smartphones for their project) and tap into the creative potential of boredom. They are doing this through a week full of podcasts with accompanied daily challenges. 

Studies on boredom have shown that the performance of boring tasks have creativity-boosting effects. Test subjects who were given the boredom inducing task of copying the phone book for 15 minutes, outperformed a control group on a standard creativity test. When groups were given the more passive boring task of simply reading the phone book, they outperformed both groups. Passive boredom, which leads to mind wandering, fosters creative and productive boost. 

We eat, sleep, commute and even go to the bathroom with our phones. As New Tech City points out, the average mobile user checks their phone 150 times a day. Much of this time, especially time spent waiting in line, standing on the subway or sitting on the toilet used to be spent letting one's mind wander and being bored. Instabored aims take back our time on the toilet from distraction, and instead fill it with boredom. 

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Intent of The Void

This week I worked towards setting the intent of my thesis project. In class, I spent a few minutes verbally communicating my thesis to two classmates who jotted down key words as I spoke. We then worked together to sort the key points into the categories of 'good' and 'bad.' What qualifies as good or bad is entirely subjective based on the context. It was incredibly helpful to clarify where things fall on the spectrum between good and bad within the specific context of my thesis. Identifying what I consider to be 'bad', or the end of the spectrum I want to move away from, was especially helpful. 

I've identified four key continuums of intent: 

Exclusive – Inclusive Reflecting on the thesis work I've created so far, I now recognize that many of my concepts only appeal to a rather narrow audience. That was not my attention, but having an awareness of this point can help me move towards designing offerings that are inclusive to a broader audience. 

Teaching – Discovery With the help of a group during the sorting process of the workshop, I was able to clarify that I am interested in creating opportunities for individuals to discover the benefits of The Void, rather than directly teaching them.

Private – Public I don't want to move entirely away from work intended for more personal and private uses, but I do want to expand my focus to include more public interventions.   

Safe – Risky This last continuum addresses a more personal intent, beyond the scope of just this thesis.. As I get closer and closer to the end of this thesis project and graduate school itself, I am becoming increasingly aware of the unique context of school. Once I transition into a job following school, I will have to take into consideration an entire new set of intentions that will be set by employers, clients ect.. There are only a few months left for me to design with my intentions as the first priority. I want to make sure I'm taking risks during this limited time. 

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Much of the work I created in the fall was focused on personal interventions that are initiated by the actual user. This past week I chose to explore what The Void would look like if it were created for users by an outside entity. I imagined what The Void would look like as relief from subway advertising and as silence brought to you through YouTube video advertising.

Both of these suggested interventions take place at points of transition, where one is typically focused on the destination rather than the transition itself: in the subway the focus is on your end point of travel, and in the world of your web browser, on the desired content you are looking to view.

Though these transitional spaces are often overlooked by the people passing through them, they are not overlooked by advertisers. People and companies are fighting for these spaces. Advertisers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to fill these voids with their content. 

After showing this work in class, the question was posed, what is the actual monetary value of these two voids? Finding specifics on both the cost of full-car subway advertising and YouTube instream ads is more difficult than I expected. For some reference, Target paid $250,000 back in 2010 to cover an entire subway car in their advertising. http://www.startribune.com/business/97445589.html

Graffiti artists were the first to pioneer the takeover of the subways as canvases for content. The city now does a remarkably quick job of removing non-paying 'advertisers' and removes graffiti and fliers almost immediately. Some artists are trying to take back the subway as their territory. Here you can watch two graffiti artists hijack an entire car to promote their work:

http://youtu.be/Vd6Z25tfq58

In this case, the artists are taking back the territory they see as their own, but they are replacing one advertisement with another.

Designer, Ji Lee, has played in the territory of voided public spaces with his Bubble Project:

http://pleaseenjoy.com/projects/personal/bubble-project/#image282

Lee's work is laying a fresh void over the void that has already been filled with advertising. He is creating an opportunity for advertising, which is traditionally a one-sided form of communication, to become a dialogue in which the viewer is given the chance to respond. 

In both of these examples, the economic system that has been set up between the MTA and paying advertisers is being circumvented. I'm interesting in exploring ways to utilize the system itself to create a voided experience within these transitional spaces that everyone is fighting for. 

More on this topic to come. 

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The beginning of the end

This post marks the beginning of the end, the final semester of the thesis project. I had my first class meeting with Information Architect Abby Covert. One of the key points discussed in class is that everything is complex. This goes for thesis and the world at large. Everyone has a subjective take on this complexity and this quickly turns into a great big mess. Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make the complexity more understandable as a whole. The good news is that there are tools to aide in this process. As designers, we are armed with visual tools that make communicating our personal spin a little bit easier.

In class, I mapped out my current hopes and fears surrounding my thesis.

The creation of the map showed me a clear unbalance. The majority of the map is taken up by fears. This was an interesting discovery, because at beginning of the exercise, I was feeling generally pretty positive about my thesis. There are clearly many underlying questions and hesitations that I need to begin addressing.

Many of my fears revolve around myself getting in the way of my own progress. In this area, the biggest concerns being my tendency towards procrastination with writing and concern of maintaining enough energy and stamina to push through these final few months. For my thesis topic itself, the map pointed to some issues that I have not clearly worked out. These are rabbit holes that I need to dive into and explore more deeply. At this point, I think clearly identifying and understanding the audience for The Void is most urgent.

One of the things I am most excited about is the discovery today that my uniform project, Nothing to Wear, is spreading. Two of the first year students in the program have adopted a uniform that they plan on wearing for the next few months. This small ripple effect is exciting because I believe larger cultural change begins with the incremental change of individuals. 

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Speculative Corporate Partnership - H&M Uniform Collection 

Press Release Normcore Eclipsed by the Uniform H&M Launches Uniform Collection

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 24, 2015

New York Fashion week always ushers in a wave of new trends. Last week, the most shocking was seen on the streets and front rows of the shows, rather than on the runways. Fashionistas and ‘it’ kids who usually can be seen wearing dozens of different outfits throughout the course of the week showed up instead in the same outfit, over and over again.

Fashion blogger, Susie Bubble, wore a strict uniform throughout fashion week. “By not being distracted by myself each day, I’m better able to focus on what I am really here for, to see and write about the work being presented.”

Fiona Duncan, the writer for New York Magazine who brought the term ‘normcore’ into the mainstream says, “If 2014 was the year of normcore, 2015 is the year of the uniform. What’s more liberating than deciding to dress like a ‘normal person’ every day? Not having to decide at all.” 

H&M clearly saw this trend coming and today announced the launch of a new uniform collection. The collection consists of a line of clothing constructed out of materials chosen for longevity, rather than fast trends and short wear. Items are meant to be bought in sets that can be worn day after day.

The campaign slogan, “Buy less, buy better,” is a drastic departure from the status quo of the company built on fast fashion. The growing trend of uniform is forcing large corporations to rethink the way they do business.

Lucy Knops, the designer of H&M’s uniform collection began to wear a personalized uniform back in 2014. She explains, “by choosing outfits on a six month rather than daily calendar, the role of the consumer and the responsibility of the designer is shifted. For the collection, we carefully chose materials that wear well over time, that you can keep in your closet for years rather than months.” It is a small step she says, but one in the right direction. From the consumer’s point of view, she explains that the collection isn’t about becoming a uniformed mass. It is rather a way for people to thoughtfully craft their individuality over a stretched out timeline. There is more of a commitment so it makes a larger statement.

Fast fashion has been on an unsustainable trajectory of getting faster and cheaper. Forever 21 recently launched F21 Red, a brand with starting price points of $1.80 for camisoles and $7.80 denim. One can’t help think of the factory collapse in Bangladesh and wonder what the true costs of these extreme low prices actually are. H&M’s “Buy less, buy better” campaign falls in line with their recent pledge to improve factory conditions. 

The Uniform Collection is available in stores and online.

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Ji Lee, Delete Billboard 

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Michael Heizer, North, East, South, West