Team with Chantal Ramzy, Jouke Jult, Genevieve Korte, Pinar Kesenci, Monica Vogels
Introduction
Attentionware explores with a critical and fun approach how the social media, mobile applications and digital assistants listen, seek for our attention and exploit us. What would happen if smart assistants i.e. Alexa, Siri starting to ‘seduce’ the people that stand around them? Together with the team we effectively built upon this concept and related the idea to current social, cultural and economic trends: strangers catcalling passersby[1]–[3], raising awareness for #stopstreetharassment[1], [4], new laws for confining street harassment [2], [4] which make it punishable with a fine of 190€ in Amsterdam and Rotterdam since 2018, smartphone notifications battling for your attention[5], social media addiction[6], [7] and the evolution and integration of smart home assistants in our lives[8]–[10]. Attentionware was born with key components of generating pick-up lines, making people feel attracted or embarrassed, guilty or filthy, annoyed or enjoyed of the interaction. The interaction would happen willingly or not and, in this way, we wanted to emphasize how our personal devices require attention and provoke people to interact with them.
Experience Design
Attentionware is an installation is a visual representation bringing out this perverse side of technology by humanizing it - giving it an organic form and a human sound, trying to get the passerby to interact with it and changing attitude with the warmth of touch. But beware, the modules are aware of each other and will compete for your attention, becoming jealous when you interact with one other than itself and will try to persuade you further to leave the other and interact with it instead. The video below demonstrates what interacting with Attentionware is like.
Process
In numbers the team managed make more than 20 silicon prototypes, 1 3D-printed mould, 5 accurate copies of the silicon blobs, 4 wooden bases, test more than 15 different technologies and shrink down and optimize 9 hardware components for each module. In total, 2 fully working Attentionware modules were soldered and they were aware of each other through ESP8266 WiFi chip (Wemos), and aware of human presence thanks to sonar components.
References
[1] “Catcalls of NYC: The project raising awareness of street harassment | The Independent.” [Online]. Available:https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/catcalls-of-nyc-instagram-street-harassment-women-sexual-men-new-york-us-a8092636.html. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
[2] “Minister on catcalling law: Some men still say ‘It’s French culture’ - CNN.” [Online]. Available:https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/harassment-law-france/index.html. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
[3] “France plans on-the-spot fines for sexual harassment in public | World news | The Guardian.” [Online]. Available:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/21/france-plans-on-the-spot-fines-for-sexual-harassment-in-public. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
[4] “Meet the woman who takes selfies with street harassers | The Independent.” [Online]. Available:https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/woman-selfies-street-harrassers-harrassment-catcalls-men-instagram-noa-jansma-a7983991.html. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
[5] M. Pielot and L. Rello, “Productive, Anxious, Lonely - 24 Hours Without Push Notifications,” 2016.
[6] “7 Things You Realize During a Social Media Break.” [Online]. Available: https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/7-things-you-realize-during-a-social-media-break. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
[7] “Social Media Is Taking Over Our Lives!” [Online]. Available: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/social-media-taking-over-lives. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
[8] “Designing the Siris and Alexas of the World | ideo.com.” [Online]. Available: https://www.ideo.com/blog/designing-the-siris-and-alexas-of-the-world. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
[9] C. Meurisch, M.-D. Ionescu, B. Schmidt, and M. Mühlhäuser, “Reference model of next-generation digital personal assistant,” in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers on - UbiComp ’17, 2017, pp. 149–152.
[10] “We know they are listening, but what do they hear? – Analytics for Humans – Medium.” [Online]. Available:https://medium.com/analytics-for-humans/hey-listen-how-four-big-tech-companies-are-collecting-and-using-your-data-8ddb6ea857dc. [Accessed: 22-Apr-2018].
