Me wearing the prototype

Abstract
This is a jacket that will start conversations for you if you are too shy to do it yourself. Get to know more people, make friends, meet that special someone or simply break down your social walls!

This is NOT a Google AD…but the plain function of the parafunctional concept we’ve presented this week.

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The term parafunctionality was coined by A. Dunne in his PhD Thesis. Since I like Art as a way of human expression with almost no boundaries, it’s always interesting and exciting to work on the line that separates interaction design and arts.

Parafunctionality is a peculiar use quality that in my opinion is a step further the other ones I wrote about (pliability, fluency, social actability). I think that a design product that has not only good qualities but critical qualities as well, is a good example of how the design can address an important social and moral role in the society: making a better world.

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Project by: Pietro Desiato, Festim Zuta and Daniel KarlssonThis concept has been developed on the theme of fluency that means “the degree in which your able to move between media streams” (J. Lowgren). We’ve focused on the shopping activity because it is a very complex experience that involves a lot of media streams, first of all the city.

In this project we’ve tried to be fluent and not only useful. That means that we’ve thought about interactions that do not invade the personal experience of shopping but just work in the background. They offer the person an “experience add-on”. The interesting thing is that the person has the power to choose if she wants to give attention to the system or not. We think that the fluency of this system, that we’ve called in a very marketable way iShop, is in its discretion: it works silently and do not affect the your everyday life, until you want.

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According to Jonas Löwgren, Fluency is “the degree in which your able to move between media streams”. I think it’s a pretty useful quality that all designers should consider in their process. The idea of moving between streams is valueable if you think of the contemporary lifestyles and of the everyday filtering we do to select and organise the huge amount of information we receive.

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A scenario for the music mailbox

This project is about young musicians and band that would like to show their talent but cannot. It is hard to find social visibility until you are unknown. But if you are not visible you won’t be known. It is a vicious circle and it is not simple to break it.

Music Mailbox originates from the idea of creating a channel between the musicians and their everyday context. It is pretty simple to design your own website, where you can upload your songs and maybe your biography. But this won’t warrant you the visibility you would like to have: it is an unknown website of an unknown artist.

For this reason, I decided to work on a physical object that lies in a public place lived by people: I think that social actability (which was the theme of the project) expresses itself better in the real world, that where people have relations, speak and exchange their opinions, that of temporary arenas of discussions.

Moreover, there is another reason that drove me to choose the physical space that is the way we listent to the music today. Ipod and earphone have totally changed and destruct a basic aspect of music that is its sociality. Music is not only a one-to-one communication but aims to envolve people all together. In the previous post, I linked the Samsung K5 spot because it is able to explain this ‘bubble effect’ that arises boundaries against sociality.

Scenario

Johnny is the singer of an unknown band. His band has pretty good demos but it’s very difficult to perform them live. He decides to upload a demo on the music mailbox website…
Frank is crossing the central square with his friend. They notice the mailbox and their curiosity drives them to approach the object…

The mailbox starts to play a demo with some comments by the author.
The door is semi-transparent and Johnny noticed that there’s something else inside.
The inside display shows basic information about the band and the song.
While reading, Johnny can listen the comments that other people left…

The interaction dialogue

• Playing

Presence sensor
Speaker vs Earphones
When you approach the mailbox, it starts to play randomly (thanks to a sensor). You can listen to a demo with short comment by the authors

• Skipping

One artist, one mailbox
Twisting
Affordance

The mailbox is private only in its shape. It will be a community mailbox that sends and receives information about more than one band. For this reason, the person that interact with it should have the possibility to skip the song. In the beginning, I thought about having a display on the external side of the door to help the navigation. However, the metaphor is really strong and I wanted to keep it clean without having buttons and lights on the outside, at least.

Skipping music is like changing mailbox. A private mailbox is in fronte of your house and if you look to a street you’ll see a lot of mailboxes in front of their houses. For this reason, I thought that skipping would be like ‘going from one mailbox to another’ and that would be done by twisting the mailbox on its axis. For that I needed to offer an affordance which could suggest the person to twist the object (a lever).

• Details

The role of the door
The display
Soundscape of comments

The door has a preminent role in the interaction since it split persons in two groups. The ones who decide to listen to the demos and the ones who are interested and want to go deeper. These ones will probably open the door and look inside. Another affordance is the semi-transparency of the door: it shows that there is something else inside (a continuos provocation!)

Once you open it, a display shows you some informations about the band and the song playing. Moreover, the volume goes a little down so that you can hear a soundscape of voice. Those are the comments people left before you.

• Comment

You can record your opinion through a microphone

The social actability

Unknown artists and bands can get visibility in the local context
The mailbox is a trigger for social relationships and local culture knowledge
Trigger for temporary arenas
The feedbacks the bands receives work as adhesive (group cohesion)