What would it be like to mute selective parts of the physical world? This investigation is a rough look at how information can be heightened by the attenuation of other information. As the mediated world increases the scale and volume of messages, each individual message has less effect. The reduction of messages, and even places & people (or their digital representations, at least) is something that happens online, both electively and automatically. And here my explorations are not unbiased. My scenario envision a world that is attenuated and not expanded by more connectivity and technology. I am interested in the idea that radical customization, often a branded as a feature (and it often is, and a good one), unchecked, it can narrow perspectives by quieting dissimilar points of view in a move toward, cyberbalkanization or "splinternet". In a splinternet, users' social groups and information-space becomes smaller and smaller, creating insular online communities, with echoing images, rhetoric, and active agents, without much interference from those outside the established circles.
Continuing a thread found my earlier project,
Browser Bike with my project here, Perceptionator is again recontexualizing UI patterns in terms of real-world physical space. My study regards how new physical computing ideas could interact with contemporary UI patters borrowed from the days of desktop’s dominance. These now common UI patters are now conventions and will be composted into the next generation of computing.
The Perceptionator film is a design fiction around the idea of truncating the stimulus of the real world, via context menus, in a way that computer users are now familiar with (i.e. software context menus, social media user blocking, dating-site search queries, and e-commerce browsing toolbars). The simlated effect is a muted experience of life. The current trend in “good usability” is that computer users should only be given as many options as required to satisfy their level of need at that moment. Here, I'm interested in two forms of UI: The context menu, and the user-enabled devices to hide content. I’m applying these ideas to searching through physical space.
Within the operating system and the program, words in lists become muted—grayed out—as to hint at their presence, but letting the user know they are not in the correct context to find any use of it. Options are unavailable because they don’t apply, and this eliminates confusion and clutter. What if this was to apply to an augmented reality view of the world? Persons, places, and things, are reduced to rough and inaccessible traces.
Example of muted option in UI:
In Operating System and program design: lists of menu items only show what is contextually relative to content or state. Unavailable items are only hinted at, typically in grayed lettering, making the user aware of the promise of functionality, if the correct steps are followed.
Example of muted option in UI:
In video games, often levels are locked, beckoning to be reveled—by purchase or rite of passage. The visual cue of muted levels is a call to action to engage the game.
Example of muted option in UI:
In social media, a user can hide content from a particular person, entity or on a particular subject. The other party remains in your network and unaware of this personal firewall against messages. Indication that further content is hidden may or may not be apparent. The muted content allows viewers to receive less messages they are not interested in, which makes desirable messages be seen more readily.
Example of muted option in UI:
In online advertising, natural search results—those calculated using search metrics, not advertiser dollars—are muted, or rather shouted down by paid results which appear, above natural results bigger & bolder text.
This impetus for this project was, at it's beginnings a brief informed by a collaboration with advertising firm
Saatchi & Saatchi for
Toyota Motor Corporation. In early explorations, I considered what the quest of the buyer might look like. What does the path of desire look? Desire is the root of the search query. So, how does it begin? How does it end? What kinds of paths to what kinds of ends do people go through?
This film was the end product of a research project that began in the highly mediated Las Vegas strip, where I explored and documented the space through it's messages, both explicit and implicit. The overwhelming experience culminated with a desire to pair down the physical world and have a return to some simpler notion where we get all that we want, with none of what we don't. There is a danger in this overtly idealized scenario where a person would be less free and less able to have serendipitous experiences, in a place where persons are walking around with true blinders to everything but things that fit their already known ideals. The film culminates with a certain ambiguity with a slight sense of false hope, that is meant as a critique of the trend toward customization of one's life with options that eliminate all unpleasantness through planned ignorance.
This project also continues a thread found in prior group work,
Calabasas Murmurs, which focused on a suburban community that is geographically prone to isolation except by few inroads. In the project, conversations among community members were sampled then distilled to rhythmic word patterns, in effect, lessening the real-world experience in a way not dissimilar to The Perceptionator.
In the case of our this suburban example, commuter culture and freeway systems can let people pass through neighborhoods on a daily basis and be completely oblivious of the communities beyond the freeway's walls. Through these channels, freeways through voids, one's "community" can be just a few square blocks separated thirty miles apart. The freeway attenuates the driving experience to just a road, muting the everything but a hint of the community beyond it's enclosing sound barriers.
This related exercise in filmmaking, looks at the idea of degrading—effectively lessening—the filmic representation of real-life through technology layers. A camera camera and a monitor allow one to see one's self, but through a webcamera fed into a computer output to a tv, which is recorded by a VHS camera which is fed to the viewing monitor. The camera and monitor is front facing, but behind this, there is layers of technology obfusgating, degrading and lessening the quality of the representation.
Las Vegas Research in collaboration with Eric Battin
Film actor: Vivian Tu
Adviser: Tim Durfee 
Preliminary sketches:
Paper prototype:
Our can devices pull language sampled directly from interviews conducted around MDP & Pasadena coffeeshops. These interviews reveal that our hunches may be right—that people rely on their own metaphorical canned responses to evade or exit conversations. In our physical cans, we sampled some of the choicest terminal language.
