two paragraphs summary

Notopia

Beneath the glossy surface of offi cial design lurks a dark and strangeworld driven byreal human needs. Aplace where electronic objects co-star in a noir thriller, working with like-minded individuals to escape normalisationand ensure that eve n a totally manufactured environment has room fordanger, adventure and transgression. We don't think that design can ever fully anticipate the richness ofthis unofficial worldand neither should it. But it can draw inspiration from it and developnew design approaches and roles so that as our newenvironment evolves, there is still scope for rich and complex human pleasure.

Corporate futurologists fo rce-fee d us a 'happy-ever-after' portrayal of life where technologyis the solution to everyproblem. There is no roomfor doubt or complexity in their techno-utopian visions. Everyone is a stereotype, and social and cultural roles remain unchanged. Despite the fact that technologyis evolving, the imagined productsthat feature in their fantasies reassure us that nothing essential will change, everything will stay the same. These future forecasters have a conservative role, predictingpatterns of behaviourin relation to technological developments. Theydraw fromwhat we already know about people, and weave new ideas into existing realities. The resulting scenarios extend pre-existent reality into the future and so reinforce the status quo rather than challenging it. Their slick surface distracts us from the dystopian vision of life theywish for. By designingthe props for the videos produced to show us what the future could be like, design works to keep officia l values in place.

An occasional glance through almost any newspaper reveals a very different viewofeveryday life, where complexemotions, desires and needs are played out through the misuse and abuse ofelectronic products and systems. Amother shoots her son after an argument over which television channel to watch; a parent is outraged bya speaking doll made in China whichsounds like it swears; the police set a trap for scanner snoopers- people who listen in to emergency radio frequencies illegally- by broadcasting a message that a UFO has landed in a local forest, within minutes several cars arriveand their scanners are confiscated. Many ofthesestories illustrate the narrative space entered byusing and misusing a simple electronic product, howinteraction with everyday electronic technologies can generate rich narratives that challenge the conformity ofeveryday life by short-circuiting our emotions and states of mind. Thesestories blend the physical reality of place with electronically mediated experience and mental affect. They form part ofa pathology of material culture that includes aberrations, transgressions and obsessio ns, the consequences ofand motivations for the misuse of objects, and object malfunctions. Theyprovide glimpses of another more complex reality hidden beneath the slick surface of electronic consumerism.

Amateur subversio ns and beta-testers

When an object's use is subverted, it is as though the protagonist is cheating the sys tem and derivin g more pleasure than is his or her due. Thesubve rsion offunction relates to a breakdown of order; something else becomes visible, unnameable, unable to fi nd a correspondence in the material world. This subversio n of function is related to not being able to find the right word, leading to the coining of neologis ms that bend language to accommodate something new. Des ire leads to a subversion of the

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environment creatingan opportunity to reconfigure it to suit our 'illegitimate' needs, establishing new andunofficial narratives.

Some people already exploit the potentially subversive possibilities ofthis parallel world ofiIlicit pleasures stolenfrom commodified experience. They seekout (ab)user-friendly products that lend themselves to imaginative possibilities forshort-circuiting the combinatorial limits suggested by electronic products. This ranges from terrorists fashioning bombs andweapons out ofmundane everyday objects, many ofwhich are listed in the Anarchist Cookbook, to Otaku magazines showing Japanese gadget geeks how to modify standard electronic products to squeeze extrafunctionality out of them. There are no futurologists at work here. The main players in thisworld are beta-testers, tweaking andadjusting reality on a day-to-day basis. They are dissatisfied withthe version ofreality on offer, but ratherthan escaping or dropping out, theyadjustit to suit themselves. Concerned withsoftware not hardware, they invent new uses for existing technologies and promote interaction with'designed' objects that subverttheir anticipated uses. In doing so, theychallenge the mechanisms that legitimise the conceptual models embodied in the design ofthe product or system and demonstrate behaviours towards technology that invite othersto follow.

Beta-testers have learnt how to derive enjoyment from electronic materiality, from rejecting the material realities on offer andconstructing their own. They display a level ofpleasure in customisation currently limited to homeDIY andcustom car hobbyists. Many specialist magazines andbooks are already available that show readers how to modify or tweak everyday electronic products. Most ofthem area littletechnical, but only because knowledge ofelectronics isstillnot as common asother forms of practical know-how. After all, an ever-growing numberofhome improvement magazines and TV programmes thriveon the pleasure people get from modifying their environments themselves - of customising reality. Maybe in the future we wiII seepopular electronics magazines that show us how to turn our mobile phones into eavesdropping devices in three easy steps?

Consumers as anti-heroes: some cautionary tales

The almost unbelievable stories reported in newspapers testify to the unpredictable potential ofhuman beings to establish new situations despite the constraints on everyday life imposed throughelectronic objects. We are interested in people who have assimilated electronic technologies so fully intotheir lives that they feel comfortable doing thingsotherswould think ofas almost toosacred or highly charged for technology. These individuals can bethoughtofas sad, based on the view that playing out deeply human narratives through technological objects isdegrading and inferior to moretraditional media. Or they canbeseenas early adopters, able to find meaning and recognise the potential ofnew technologies for supporting complex humanemotions anddesires.

Teenagers are now usingtheir mobile phones to intimidate eachother. Anew form ofbullying has emerged since Christmas 1999, when a huge numberofteenagers in Britain received pre-paid mobile phones as gifts. Earlier in the year, a 15-year-old was driven to suicide afterreceiving upto 20silentcalls in halfan hour. Theteenager left a suicide text message on her mobile phone the nightbefore she died. The fact that her suicide note was in the form ofa textmessage ratherthan handwritten will seem even more tragic to some, but to this girltextmessages played a morevital role in her life than letters.

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As a society weare strugglingto define and communicate the safe useof new media to teenagers. Just as wehave developed models ofsafe behaviour for the street and for dealing with strangers in cars,wewill have to do so for phonesand computers. It is not that these technologies are in themselves harmful, it is their use and misuse that we needto understand. Another distressing example is that ofthe 16-year-old schoolgirl raped bya man she chatted up with phonetext messages. She swapped messages forweeks before agreeing to meet the stranger in a car park. For many teenagers, the mobile phoneis a gateway to romance, and newhybrid services are fusing the lonely hearts columnwith text messaging. It is onlya matter of time before purely text-based romancingmatures as a genre ofits own.

Amore humorous example is the man in Australia who married his TV. Duringthe ceremony, he placed a goldwedding ring on top ofthe TV set and one on his finger. Heeven promised to 'love, honourand obey' the product. One day it just occurred to him that his TV was the best companion he hadever had- he watched up to ten hours a day. It is easy to criticise people whowatchso much TV, but in many ways this formof happiness shows what might be in store for the rest of us as society becomes even more electronically mediated. Thoughit is not necessarily a good thing, somepeople clearly find the company ofelectronic productsmore satisfying than that of people. These individuals are not rejecting other people because oftechnology; they have found happiness with technolgy instead. Before the advent oftelevision and the web, they might have beenlonely.

Maybe these obsessive behaviours provide glimpses ofa futurewhereelectronic products have been fully assimilated into everyday culture and our psyche. They are cautionary tales; they push our relationship with the mediumofelectronic technology to the limit.Thisis despite the design ofthe products: in fact there is a contrast between the banaldesign of many electronic products and the extreme misuses they are subjected to. Products couldoffer more complex and demanding aesthetic experiences if designers referred to this bizarreworld ofthe 'infra-ordinary', where storiesshow that truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and prove that our experience ofeveryday day life lived through conventional electronic productsis aesthetically impoverished.

Electronicproduct as neglected medium

The unique narrative potential ofconsumer electronic products has received surprisingly little attention from artists and designers. Even though industrial designplays a part in the design ofextreme pain (e.g.weapons) and pleasure (e.g. sexaids), the range ofemotions offered through most electronic products is pathetically narrow.

Whenthe SonyWalkman was introduced in the early 1980s, it offered people a newkind of relationship to urban space. It allowed the wearer to create their ownportable micro-environment, and it provided a soundtrack for travel through the city, encouragingdifferent readings offamiliar settings. It functioned as an urban interface. Nearly twentyyears on, there are hundreds ofvariations on the original Walkman, but the relationship it created to the cityremains the same. This scenarioreflectshowproductdesigners have responded to the aesthetic challenge ofelectronic technology. Theyhave accepted a role as a semiotician, a companionofpackaging designers and marketeers, creatingsemioticskins for incomprehensible technologies. Theelectronic product accordingly occupies a strange place in the worldof material culture, closer to washing powder and cough mixture than furniture and architecture. Form and texture are manipulated to evoke a worldoffantasy and fiction , blurring distinctions between everyday life and the hyper-realityofadvertising and branding.

Product genres

This isjust one approach to product design, one genre ifyou like, which offers a very limited experience. Like a Hollywood movi e, the emphasis is on easy pleasure and conformist values. This genre reinforces the status quo rather than challenging it. We are surrounded byproductsthat give us an illusion of choiceand encourage passivity. But industrial design's positionat the heart of consumer culture (it is fuelled by the capitalist system, after all) could be subverted for more socially beneficial ends by providing a unique aesthetic mediumthat engages the user's imaginationin waysa film might, without being utopian or prescribing how things ought to be.

Electronic products and servicescould enrich and expand our experience ofeveryday life rather than closing it down; they could become a medium for experiencing complex aesthetic situations. To achieve this, designers would have to think about products and services very differently. There could be so many other genres of product beyond the bland Hollywood mainstream: arthouse, porn, romance, horror - noir, even - that exploit the unique and exciting functional and aesthetic potential of electronic technology. Although many products already fall into genres - Alessi products attempt design as comedy, designs forweapons and medical equipment can shock and horrify, sex-aids are obviouslya form of design porn and white goods expressa wholesome and romantic idea of sett led domesticity - they do not aesthetically challenge or disturb.

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Des ign No ir

Ifthe current situation in productdesign is analogous to the Hollywood blockbuster, then an interesting placeto explore in more detail might be its opposite: Design Noir.As a genre, it would focus on how the psycho logical dimensions ofexperiences offered through electronic products can be expanded. By referring to the world of product misuse and abuse,where desire overflows its material limits and subvertsthe function ofeveryday objects , this product genre wouldaddress the darker, concept ual models of need that are usually limited to cinemaand literature. . ..v: ..

No ir products would be conceptual products, a medium that fusescomplexnarratives with everyday life. This is verydifferent from conceptual design, which uses design proposals as a medium for exploring what these products might be like. Conceptual design can exist comfortably in book or video form, it is about life whereas conceptual productsare part oflife. Wi th this form ofdesign, the 'product' would be a fusion of psychological and external 'realities', the user would becomea protagonist and co- producer of narrative experience rather than a passive consumer of a product's meaning. The mental interfacebetween the individual and the product is where the 'experience' lies. Electronic technology makes this meeting more fluid , more complexand more interesting.

Like in Film Noir, the emphasis wou ld be on existentialism. Imagine objects that generate 'existential moments' - a dilemma, for instance- whichtheywould stage or dramatise. These objects would not help people to adapt to existing social, cultural and political values. Instead, the product would fo rce a decision onto the user, revealing how limited choices are usually hard-wired into products for us. On another level, we could simply enjoythe wickedness ofthe values embedded in these products and services. Their veryexistence is enough to create pleasure.

Many interesting examplesof noir products already exist, but they are not created by designers. Thebest examplesofhow design responds to the psychological and behavioural dimensionsofelectronics can be found at the edges ofanonymous design. These products and services work on a radically differentaesthetic principal from traditional products: it is what they do that creates pleasure, not how they look and fee l. It is the thrillof transgression that counts here. Even ifwe do not use them, just imagining these objects in use creates a strong and perversely enjoyable experience. They showhow design productsand services can function as a mediumfor producing complex psychological experiences.

The Truth Phone, a real product producedbythe Counter Spy shop, is one example of howa No ir product might work. It combines a voice stress analyser with a telephone, and shows howelectronic products have the potential to generate a chain of events which together forma story. If you consider products in th is way, the focus ofthe design shiftsfrom concerns of physical interaction (passive button pushing) to the potential psychological experiences inherent in the product. Imagine speaki ng to your mother or a lover while the Truth Phone suggeststheyare lying. The user becomes a protagonist and the designerbecomes a co-author ofthe experience, the product creates dilemmas rather than resolving them. By using the phone, the ownerexploresboundaries between himselfand the paranoid user suggested bythe product, entering into a psychological adventure.

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The Truth Phone and similar electronicobjects generatea conceptual space where interactivity can challenge and enlarge the schemethrough which we interpret our experiences ofusing everyday electronic objects and the social experiences they mediate. The effect is not onlylimited to products: as its name suggests, Ace-Alibi.corn is a service for creating falsealibis.When you subscribe, you might choose an option that involves being sent a letter inviting you to a conference.The letter will be postmarked with the correct area code, and you can alsoarrange to leave a contact number whichwill be answered in the correct regional accent. Franchises ofthis service are available, although the people behind the scheme are nervous about offering the service in the Un ited States, in case theyare sued for their part in helping employees bunk off work. We findthis service interesting because it meets a real need not fulfilledanywhere else. You maynot agreewith it or choose to use it, but manypeop le use this service. The pleasureprovided bythe existence ofa service like this lies is in resolving the dilemmait presents. It is as though the internet reflects human nature in all its imperfections while the material world of consumer products only reflects idealised notions of correct behaviour.

Alongsimilar linesto Ace-Alibi.corn is the Alibi CD produced in Germanyby Silenzio. It contains recordings ofstreet sounds, airport announcements fromdifferent countries, train stations, bars and beaches. Designed for those 'little white lies in between', the CD is intendedto be played in the background while youare making a telephone call from a place you should not be. This soundtrack CD allows you to cut and paste reality. Its veryexistence triggers a chain ofthoughts and narratives in the imagination.

TERMS , CONDI TIONS & DI SCLAIMER

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