Suz@nna

I chose to reflect on the Real Snail Mail project for my essay and I believe it is a good example of a project within Interactiondesign and Physical Computing. The designgroup that created the Real Snail Mail-project have observed humans and noticed the stress and pressure we carry around with daily. By observing and identifying most of the peoples needs they started the process to try to change it in a experimental way for us to slow down a bit in our daily life.

The design group Boredomreseach has used Physical Computing embedded with interactiondesign by observing and processing (they did reflect of the stress in todays society), then using a RFID reader that they implemented to the shell of a snail so the snail should be able to recieve messages/emails. It takes some time until the snail pass a hotspot and in the meantime we will be put ia a que-line. Their mainidea was to interrupt our normal routine and it is a pretty amusing project. Imagine how you send a mail and it will be carried out by a snail until it gets to a hotspot that will recieve the message.

Their idea was to make the people to stop for just a second and get some time instead of losing it. And in a way they are right. The life pass us by with all the technology around us, it´s allmost that we don´t need to think anymore cause the technology control our lifes and it have started to think for us as well the last few years. You can ask anyone today and they all have something technical that they can´t be without. We are all spoiled with all the technical gadgets and the possibilities to contact people on the other side of the world the same minit we want to, and be able to recieve an answer within a second.

We all take todays technology for granted, most of the technology works smoothly and we have our daily routine. In some way this should make us think one extra time, even for just a minit about the surroundings, about the time and the waiting. If this was something we should use daily it should become a personal technology but I don´t know if we should have the patience for that in the long run, to be able to be put in a waitinglist for our messages to arrive. We are all used to work fast and that things around us goes fast for us to be able to continue working without any interuption in our workinglife. Instead I believe the snail mail can be seen more like a game, to see if the snail arrive and if our mail will be delivered, for us to try out something different and make us at least think about it and about the life we living today.

Snails symbolize the slow movements, our definition of fast might be a fast car or Internet. In this way they succeded by using snails as the mainpart of their project. When we read the Topic Real Snail Mail we know exactly what it is before we even read the text who informs us about the project. We take the conclusions just by one glance before we go deeper into the text.

Better late than never, here comes some pictures from the Workshop Tidernas Kafferep with the Unsworn, Erik and Magnus. All the groups got to brainstorm, we had got a task what to bring back. Our task was to bring candy from Statoil back to school for the "coffebreak", where we should se what the others had done and discuss it over a cup of coffee and some candy and fruits etc.

We were only allowed to use cardboard as the material to build from. We decided to make a "fishing pond" so we could play at the same time as we picked our candy. As soon as we passed the doors in Statiol the man who worked there helped us to fish some candy. two young girls thought it was fun as well so we can say it was a success, hehe, from the start to the end we had about 1-2 hours to brainstorm and build it and test it in real life.. We had pretty fun while building it and testing it.


Brainstorming


Started to build it




The Result


At Statoil


;)

Today we had our first lecture in Physical Computing 2. It will be a challenge. I will need my lap top now more than ever so I had to buy a new adapter today (500 kr) for my mac because the other one was broken and only worked when it wanted to..Tomorrow I have to buy a cord for my mac and my Arduinoboard, another 300 kr.... On our first labsession we will work with DMX with our arduinoboards.


My old arduinoboard, I had to buy a new one for my Mac.

I really look forward for this course...A real challenge and stimulating to actually do something that I am interested in :). This course is for the next 10 weeks, parallel with OOP4, programming - databases/SQL.

We are gonna have a big project, don´t know to much about it yet. If you want you can check out the website from our last project in Physical computing 1.

we will have free hands of doing what we want, with some kind of purpose.
Our idea is to create our own country, the idea was borned the day after the elections...

The result:
The NON-GENDER Conversation Game

We created a game instead. At the time you sat down by the table you had no gender. You were not allowed to mention the words he, she, him, her, mother, father, homosexual, lesbian etc.. It was really interesting to try to have a conversation like that. We had created cards with questions in all kind of different subjects just to keep the game going. It was supposed to be at least 6 people around the table, if someone failed they had to leave their seat and another one took their place.

It was fun, it took us 2 weeks of long discussions and brainstorming but it might have been 2 intense weeks but very giving and challenging.

Today was such a great and fun day! Wow! We have our third workshop, it is lasting for two days. The name is In the city - ballets.

It is about using action space in the city and creating a choreography in the city. Today we made a slowwalk from Stortorget in Malmö to Gustav adolfs torg. Normally it takes 3 minutes, we had to make in 30 minuts. We were NOT allowed to talk to echother or anyone...

So there were one hundred students walking slowly, like snails, in total silence: Can you imagine the attention we got from the people around. Hehe, it was real fun.


A picture taken in the beginning of the SlowWalk

So about the assignment we got.
We are 9 groups with 10-12 people in each group, every group have a spot in Malmö where they will stage a choreagraphy for all the 100 students on a walk on 10 minutes where the next group have their spot and so on until we reach school again 3 hours later.

Our group starts out on Lilla torg as group 9. Our task is to smile.
The rules are:
1 - Stick together as a group
2 - Don´t talk with each other
3 - Smile all the time - so you show your teeth
4 - Say hej, hallå or tjena to all the people on our way to spot 10 (back at school)

Can you imagine a 100 students walking in silence and when we meet up with a person/persons everybody smiles and says hi!?

Haha - it is really fun!
I will write about all of the tasks this weekend, I promise!

So we met up on Monday. Everybody came up with some ideas and then we discussed and improved them. The ideas I told you about earlier changed rapidly even if we kept the main thought about making the people feel involved in the hole project, for them to enjoy the hole concept. The idea was to let them write a poem. For everybody who passed to contribute with a word they had to write down on a piece of paper and then hang up on strings we put between the trees, over the walkingroad...

We created the atmosphere and the mood by having music playing, the weather was sunny and that helped a lot.. The people enjoyed writing the words and their curiosity for our project was bigger than expected.



We split into 2 groups, one for the morning and one for the afternoon. The idea was to be creative in two different ways. I was in the morninggroup. At first we let them put any word they had in mind. But after some time we noticed that noone cared of building the sentences. Instead we had too many words. Then we changed the string so it went over the road so they had to watch out for it while bicycling. It also got their attention in another way. We also let them remove any word they liked. A word they found unsuitable.




It was really interesting to see their reactions over this episode a normal tuesday, in their park.
The poem will be posted here.


One woman created this sentence with help from the existing words and a few of her own.

060908 - Friday

We met up with the group and recieved our assignment for the New Beginnings workshop. We recieved a map with an area we should walk within, we should discuss places we liked/disliked/history etc. Such a wonderful day for a walk, we had a really nice time strolling around and talking about everything between places and more personal stuff..

We discussed the five places we chose and decided in the end of the day to contribute with something in Slottsparken. We talked about the people who took their "daily/weekly" walk there, what we could surprise them with.. We played with some different ideas. First we talked about building a box, someone should hide inside and give compliments. Another idea was to install 2 tables in the park, so the people could take a break from walking, get some company for a few minits playing a game, back gamon for an example. A table with someone there to play with when needed. ;)

Then we decided to think more over the weekend and meet up om mondaymorning and decide.


Slottsparken...


A playingground


Fiskehoddorna


Fiskehoddorna


Mölleplatsen

The idea
I know when I start to work in a few years from now, it will be many hours every day. By looking at the clock om the wall I will feel stressed by the hours I spend in front of my computer..

So my idea was to create a clock on the wall...But the main idea is that it isn´t really a clock, it just looks like one. It will make me relaxed when i am sitting by the computer...to not see the time everytime my eyes goes there..

It will be mirrorlike inside. But it is not a mirror, i will not be able to see myself, i will not be able to see the darkness under my eyes from working all those late hours...

So...
I will take the photo soon. It will be here tonight som you can see it.

but I´m not sure it will do...

We will see tomorrow.. At least i been playing around with some different ideas but they are all to
high-tech... It´s ONLY because we study Interactiondesign... It´s so technical..

Curious? You will have to wait! ;)