Roman Ondak, Good Feelings in Good Times. Frieze Art Fair, Lon 2003

So this is an idea I’ve been toying with since I started this research. And finally I’ve decided it is the route I should go down.

Context: Sweden
- the swedes are perhaps the best queuers in the world.

System: Queues
- they are spontaneous
- a symbol of order & civilised behaviour
- have their own rules
- culturally dependant

The natural ability for some nations, namely the Brits and the Swedes, to form queues when waiting is said to be a sign of civilisation and order. However some argue that it’s a mindless conditioned behaviour to follow the rules, and that those nations who don’t queue are more aware of what rules ought to be followed and what rules they know they really just have to go through the motions on. So if we can get people to question the queuing system, perhaps we can make them more aware of their inbuilt cultural behaviours and thus give them a space to re-evaluate their behaviour.

Fake queues are not uncommon. However many of these queues come from a top down, advertising-driven approach. Roman Ondak (above) is one artist who staged a static queue at the frieze art fair – a performance of a “moment of non-activity”. So what if a queue was formed from a more bottom-up approach? By the people, for the people.

Previously I’ve been trying to add errors to the queuing system to see how people behave when rules are broken, and things don’t work as expected. Now the next step is to subvert the queue itself. To take something that symbolises order and efficiency and process it through an absurd and playful lens. Basically a queue that leads to nowhere. Similar to Roman Ondak but I’m interested if people begin to join the queue, behaviours that arise from people waiting without needing to wait, and if passersby notice this error of social code, and question their perception and understanding of it.

The date for the staged queue will be around the end of March. I’m looking for a strange public space in stockholm to stage it and hope to bring some extra props – tents, korv grills, musicians, to elicit different experiences. Come!! All are welcome.

See on google streetview

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

So having some good debates at the moment around my thesis – seems like my prototypes are turning up the heat on the topic of what is an error?.

Actually this a very good question and something I need to define. So far these mini-projects have been ways to investigate different definitions of error. So what have I defined as error?

1. The unexpected.
2. Wandering off track.
3. Misbehaving.
4. Wrong and Right.

There’s a big focus on play in my thesis, so I wanted to create playful interventions that explored these definitions and place them in the urban environment to test how people respond. Each prototype could not evaluate if the error could change a persons behaviour over time, as they were a one-off thing. I guess the projects more asked ‘is this an error?‘. I now need to narrow down my definition of error in order to answer my overarching thesis question: Can an experience of error excite positive change and learning? Can an experience of error favour fustration and provoke play?

So to redefine – for something to be an error it must:

1. be unintentional.
2. break a defined code.

The experience of error in these projects has been on two levels

1. The errors I, the designer, experience in my process, design and hypothesis.
2. The experience that an error has occurred for others.

Somethings missing! A third, vital level – The experience by someone else that they have committed an error.

This is the most difficult to design. For I can only design the conditions for an error to occur, and not force an error, for then it is intentional and thus not an error. Or alternatively I can find an error that people already commit, and see how I can use that error in a playful way to design with the error rather than against it. (The latter I favour as an approach.)

Then of course I need to test this experience over time to see if it changes the behaviour of the person and/or brings about a learning experience. Maybe I’ll need various tests – a control experience, then various other experiences where the variables are slightly changed to see which one is more effective.

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

View the movie

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