Post-it

This time its angry norweigan divers.

See on google streetview

It seems likely that the mechanism of the placebo response is through the production of what are called endogenous endorphins (naturally produced opiate substances) produced by the person being treated. Endorphins are released whenever we feel good, whatever the reason.

In pain, which I know best, approximately one third of patients will have a significant improvement in painful symptoms when treated with an inactive agent. This effect is increased if the doctor states that the new agent is superb. There is also a substantial placebo effect in depression and skin conditions, but much less effect in clear disease entities such as bronchitis and heart conditions.

- Stephen Tyrer, Psychiatrist and my Dad

That’s my Dad. He’s one of the leading researchers into placebo’s and their effect on depression. Alot of my Dad’s research looks into creating a believable experience for his patients as instrumental to the effect of the placebo. Queue the Experience Designer and Birgit Mager’s quote that “Experiences cannot really be designed, only the conditions that lead to experiences”. I’m taking the placebo approach on board full throttle now and aim to test it in eliciting a playful response in the face of frustration (caused by error). I’ve been finding some great examples of placebo’s used in a playful way to cope with fear, confusion and behavioural control.
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Pigs acquire, through learning and evolution, expectations of their environment. Frustration of expectations results in motivation to change these conditions and is therefore adaptive. Initially, frustration should produce problem solving behaviour. If these responses are unsuccessful, other behaviours, reflecting general frustration should be elicited. Our purpose was to study both types of responses to frustration in grower pigs.

So these scientists took 18 pigs, and fasted them for 1, 2 or 3 hours every morning. On Monday and Tuesday the pigs got full feeders BUT on Wednesday and Friday they got 2 types of feeders – lidded with the lid bolted down (L) and un-lidded that was empty (O). Results showed that pigs in pairs showed an increase in sitting and playing and single pigs started to ignore the L-feeders after 2 hours while increasingly looked into the O-feeders.

from “Frustration of goal-directed behaviour in swine”, N.Lewis in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 64, Issue 1, p 19-29

The two videos above demonstrate Change Blindness – in basic terms when you fail to spot a change in your environment. While the Derren Brown video shows how age and colour are all victums of change blindness, the second video explains much better the conditions that lead up to change blindness.

When we blink, we create our own grey flicker effect. Almost as if we’re naturally designed to miss things. Reminds me of the statement by Joe Hallihan that “we are hardwired to make mistakes“; that our brain cannot simply take in all the information around us, so it filters out the unimportant and focuses on the important. In web design techniques such as the yellow fade and a javascript blink are used to notify people of changes in the online environment. How does the built environment notify us of changes? Normally handwritten notes to notify people of change of address of a building. Notification boards, newspapers

I guess this is more about an experience of error through change

According to AlphaGalileo, the background lighting provided in a room has an influence on how we taste wine. This is the result of a survey conducted by researchers at the Institute of Psychology at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany. It was found that the same wine was rated higher when exposed to red or blue ambient light rather than green or white light.

The survey showed, among other things, that the test wine was perceived as being nearly 1.5 times sweeter in red light than in white or green light. Its fruitiness was also most highly rated in red light. Riesling combined with green light was not appreciated. Accordingly, one conclusion of the study is that the color of ambient lighting can influence how wine tastes, even when there is no direct effect on the color of the drink.

This opens up an interesting possibility; you could perhaps make use of only one type of wine to support the different courses of a dinner. Just modify the lighting conditions. The wine steward, or sommelier, will turn into ‘Light DJ’.

via The Examiner

Since 1976, Alton De Long, prof. of architecture at University of Tennessee, has been investigating the relations between perception of time and space. He created dolls houses at four different scales: 1/24, 1/12, 1/6, and full scale and asked subjects to imagine themselves as a person in the dollhouse and build a narrative behind what they were doing. He asked the subjects to signal when 30 minutes had passed.

De Long found that with a 1:12 scale, the experience of 30 minutes takes only 2.5 minutes in ‘real time’. Basically the brain speeds up in direct proportion to environmental scale. Beyond this ratio, the brain adjusts and this rule doesn’t correlate.

So in a science fiction movie this would mean that future workers stare at a miniature model of their office and reduce their 8 hour working days to 40 minutes, allowing much more time to go to fly their miniature hovercraft to the mini-pub and get drunk on one miniature pint. Excellent!

The Dance of Life, Edward T. Hall (Anchor Books Editions, 1984) p150

Two artists, Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett have taken flash mobs to the next level. They staged collective performances with the local community just as the google street car was driving through Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh. Viking fights, parades, love doctors and fleeing damsels in distress are now all archived on google maps for all to see. My favourite piece, for sheer bizarreness, is probably the giant chicken. The performance has a conceptual grounding in the current tension and fear about digital surveillance. It links quite nicely with Google’s current situation with China.

I think the artists could have pushed the idea a bit more. Performances could have been a bit more subtle, perhaps disguised as bizarre situations in a real context. The parade, for example, is rather what you would expect. If it was me, I’d like to stage lots of performances of people doing bizarre things they shouldn’t.. here’s the error thing coming back again.. if at the very least to add more variety to the peeing photo’s on google street view. More like this and this.

The piece is being shown at Manipulating Reality until January 17 at CCCS-Strozzina in Florence

The Gum Wall in Seattle is a monument to human behaviour.

The wall is outside a theatre and this all began in 1993 when patrons would stick gum to the wall while waiting for a performance. Theater company workers said began to scrape the gum routinely, but eventually gave up. Slowly the gum amassed.

We’ve all experienced it. The weird way our brain always assumes an escalator is moving, even when it’s stationary. Well trust it to science to investigate the reasons and psychology behind it:

“We investigated the physiological basis of the ‘broken escalator phenomenon’, namely the sensation that when walking onto an escalator which is stationary one experiences an odd sensation of imbalance, despite full awareness that the escalator is not going to move…The findings represent a motor aftereffect of walking onto a moving platform that occurs despite full knowledge of the changing context. As such, it demonstrates dissociation between the declarative and procedural systems in the CNS. Since gait velocity was raised before foot-sled contact, the findings are at least partly explained by open-loop, predictive behaviour. A cautious strategy of limb stiffness was not responsible for the aftereffect, as revealed by no increase in muscle cocontraction.”

from The broken escalator phenomenon. Aftereffect of walking onto a moving platform.

Personally, I rather like the feeling. However I think my quest to always “ride” a broken escalators has disappointingly educated my brain to understand that an escalator can have two states: moving and stationary.

Some other very similar investigations going on from Scott Burnham for the Exchange Radical Moments! Festival. Burnham is putting together a manual for urban hacking. It’s very much in tune with what I was talking about in a previous post about giving communities the tools and opportunity to try to re-imagine their surroundings. In this case Burnham’s key word is resourcefulness . From the Exchange Radical Moments Festival catalogue:

Resourcefulness has become one of the most important skills for people to develop today. What resources do you see being treated as waste in your city that could be used to benefit others?

The Urban Guide for Alternate Use is a catalogue of city-specific opportunities for resourcefulness within existing urban environments, compiled simply by asking the city’s residents to devise alternate uses for things already present in the city. It is a guide that acts as a catalyst for a new form of resourcefulness in the city, and as a communicative vehicle for exchange among residents.

For the festival Exchange Radical Moments, a guide will be created for one of the participating cities, filled with the ideas submitted by the city’s residents, as gestures of donation to their fellow citizens. The city guide will be written by the imagination and resourceful thinking of its residents, and can serve as an alternate guide to the city. Together the different submissions will form a powerful collection of insights into how people mentally and physically play with the urban landscape as a conglomeration of readymade objects ripe for intervention.

Took the words right out of my mouth. This alternative urban guide is so close to what this thesis project could become, that I’m definitely going to get on board when call for submissions arrives. In the meantime I aim to set up some workshops of my own.