empathy in design

it's always great to discover art (the kind with a capital A) directly functioning in the world. although i'm not exactly sure how developers could actually go about designing products that require empathy and patience from the consumer while still maintaining a profit, but i suppose it starts with perspective and the right intention. in many senses, i often keep my audience in mind when i am creating work, whether or not they have an appreciation or association with the arts, which leads me to question a lot of things.. i suppose i forget that there's only so much i can do. to provide perspective or to change their minds is something I look to do, rather than to expect. there's only so much i can control.

anyways!

"Developed world consumer desires relentlesslygrow and flex, while material possessions remain hopelessly froen in time. This incapacity for mutual evolution renders most products incapable of sustaining a durable relationship with users... For centuries, the art world has been implicitely aware of the need for mutual evolution between the consumer and the consumed. Artistic expressions from traditional oil paintings to avant-garde installations are conceived as contemplative works, rarely surrendering all their meaning at a single glance. This is enabled by the presence not simply of meaning, but of layers of meaning that continually tantalize the onlooker to provide a lifetime of incremental revelations. In 1912, German psychologist Theodor Lipps propounded the theory that the appreciation of a work of art depended upon the capacity of the spectator to project his personality into the object of contemplation. Lipps claimed that 'one had to feel oneself into it'. He named this cybernetic process Einfuhlung, which tranlsates as 'empathy'. In their current guise, consumer products lack the sophistication and layered complexity for this degree of long-term empathy to incubate. Most consumer products relinquish their tenuous meaning to a single fleeting glance, while rarely delivering any of the life-altering rewards they so confidently promise. In this respect, waste is nothing more than symptomatic of a failed user/object relationship, where insufficient empathy led to the perfunctory dumping of one by the other."

from "Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences, and Empathy" Jonathon Chapman

oooohhohoho

hahaha, oh felicia.
you are a rare breed indeed.



*pretends to be a dinosaur and runs away*

my window blinds

alright, i've thought, here's what i'm saying: one of the slats in my venetian blinds is missing.

cars drive by from outside, and their headlights fall through this opening and draw lines across my walls. slow dashes and flicks. like the waves of the ocean near my home. left to right and then gone. left to right and then gone. left to right and then..

within that particular suburban twilight, a seething sense of mystery and adventure whispered. a thrill, that i have never felt before, unfurled in my chest. a beguiling secret held in my hands. uncertain, trepid, exciting. but mostly, fearful of a belief that may

or may not be

what i think




but nevertheless, i shake my head, you see, that slat is not missing, it is creating. like, how the void in an empty glass births a potential unknown to one that is full. how an idea will always be so much greater than reality. how, a heart can fly to incredible heights and distances while the physical body cannot. how, the ability to find infinity within a tear in a piece of paper becomes so liberating, how, what is not there, becomes what matters the most, how, the empty space in a living room can leave a girl like me breathless, how,

how, despite my faithlessness in love, a romance through a myth as bold as this can leave a girl like me breathless.

a hyperopic camera: both artifact and novelty!!

my friend just referred me to Good Magazine, where i found this pretty cool article:

http://www.good.is/post/the-century-camera/







The Century Camera
The Slow Issue > Jonathon Keats on January 21, 2010 at 9:30 am PST

See what develops over the next 100 years.


The Century Camera appears in GOOD Issue 18, which is on newsstands now. While you can try printing your pinhole camera at home on a color inkjet or laser printer—make sure you print it double-sided, as you need both sides to make it work—the thicker ink of a printing press will probably give you better results over the next century or so. We recommend you go pick up a copy of GOOD Issue 18: The Slow Issue. But, if you want to give it a go, here's a PDF version of the page from the magazine.

As you flip to the next page, rip it out. Cut, prick, fold, glue. You’ve just constructed a pinhole camera that will take a single picture with a 100-year-long exposure. Since you’ll need to fix the camera in the same position until 2110, find a place that matters to you enough to document the next century of change (it will still work if you move it, the image will just be more abstract). It doesn’t have to be an endangered rainforest. It could be your own neighborhood.

This camera is a simple instrument. The pinhole lets in a little light each day, focusing it on the black ink at the back of the box. The ink will gradually fade as light streams into the camera, preserving a unique positive print of the illuminated landscape. Nothing fast-paced will be captured—neither people nor machines—but transformations over decades will register as shades of ghostly gray, and whatever remains constant will look as sharp as it would in an instantaneous snapshot.

You may not be around to see the results of your work. But if your children watch over it and protect it from the elements, and if your camera weathers the next hundred years, then your grandchildren will receive a revealing inheritance. What’s more, the following generation of GOOD readers will have the opportunity to view the image you’ve made in a special folio that the editors have committed to printing in 2110.

In the meantime, you may come across cameras set up by other readers. They might be encountered anywhere, or rest unobserved for the whole hundred years, thousands of black-box time capsules collectively witnessing our world in transition.

the body

let's think about the body as a container

like a jar?

like a house

and the organs and muscles as flowers?

as precious, as delicate,

as soft, wet garnets

bones like white wood

a pelvic nest, a ribcage fence

cradling a livelihood

badadum

I'll be gone from KORB on Vimeo.

country of ladybugs

there's a clarity within the cold, today. the unpenetrable sky, icy clear and blue, becomes almost unbearable by my shoulders. pulp in my orange slice glistens in the afternoon sunlight like biomorphic glass, i can feel my heart steadily pumping, the man holding up a cardboard sign across the street disappears into a police car. gray chunks of ice and soot line the street like sidewalk scabs. i lick the orange juice frost off my bottom lip as a ladybug crawls up the seam of a corner in the wall.

many of them are faded in color, my friend says maybe it's because they're old. there are thousands around here, like a collection of tiny heartfelt pebbles, drops of blood and insect, some moving through the dust, some dying in a haze. a small breeze picks them up in a tornado, their tiny, dry bodies swirling in the air like a post mortem dream. the silence is stirring, the space evolving, and an emptiness, a nothing, somehow emerges in and out of concrete. a "fertile void." i sigh and feel my heart skip a beat in the peace.