| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Happiness measured by the happiness of bottle openers |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Marco Susani |
I have an issue in my speech that is: to set a kind of design agenda for play. And I think within this issue, the connection is to be between what we saw, which is mostly the issue of play in designing interactive games and information, and what we know traditionally as the design agenda in products, in physical objects, in physical spaces and so on. So I will attempt to see if there is any connection between what we saw in these days happening in play and design in information design and what's going on in design of physical artefacts. I think physical design, material design has learned something from what is going on in interaction. I have some examples that I want to discuss with you about how you can maybe mistake and misunderstand what's happening in the relation and the information. And how you can reduce this to a notion of play that I don't think is something particularly interesting. So the first part of my presentation will be introducing some ideas, some notion of play that I think we can look at and bypass to go somewhere else. The first issue that I would like to touch on is the one that sees somehow the happiness of our civilisation measured by the happiness of our bottle openers. So what we see today is an idea of play that is related to a kind of very banal interpretation of what has happened in introducing friendliness in relation to technology. This idea of play has been seen mostly as an idea of putting a face on objects, of icon-ifying objects, and to diffuse this idea of Smiley faces everywhere, from bottle openers to cars to any other object. The news is that this attitude to play is diffused today in products for adults. And as I was saying before, it's a mainstream. So how can we interpret this and connect it with a notion of play so as to understand better after what we saw at Doors? Somebody says that these ideas are related to a kind of 'discovery of the communicative power of products'; that we are transforming the relation between people and objects into a kind of narration, as in fiction. I'm slightly more pessimistic in looking at this kind of way of introducing play and fanciness into products. I'm slightly more cynical because I think this idea of play is related to an idea that play is not part of our real adult, serious life, but it is connected to the life of childhood; the notion of play as just puppets and fanciness, that this is a kind of marginal moment in life where we can play and then we forget about it. But today it is allowed to connect childhood to our everyday life because we live in a happy society, and this happy society is visible and expressed through happy objects and products. I think that if we really go through all these points: play is only for children and it's not part of life, and today we are living so happy that we can be allowed to mix this - and especially the idea that happiness should be so banally attached to the products that we buy. I think this is a critical notion of play that we can pass over and leave behind. Personally, I have an image of these objects integrated in everyday life, not so much in the shells but in everyday life, that I'm able to explain only with an image. That is not one of the images I brought, but I guess it's an image that you can understand easily. You all know Mister Bean, I guess, and you know that he has a teddy bear. And when I'm imagining the atmosphere of somebody sitting in front of his Smiley bottle opener, I'm reminded of Mister Bean sitting alone in his home in front of his teddy bear and speaking with the teddy bear, watching TV together with him. So in some way I see these ideas of play as a kind of desperate attempt to put human presence into the solitude of life of our home. And I see this not as a very fantastic idea of play and friendliness. Moreover, there is a notion of play in this object that I see as a kind of imperative. To me these objects say 'play!', not 'enjoy life!', but it's a kind of imposed and it's a kind of connection between play - because you have to enjoy life, because you have to buy new products; because you have to play, because you have to enjoy life, and so on. So this I think is what today we can see as a critical issue in how play has been taken in product design, in the design of the physical environment. And I don't know if interaction designers have anything to learn from this. Having said this, I know that I've put a kind of layer of depression over you, so I should find some way to take a positive example, to inject some life and to be more optimistic. And I did struggle to find examples on how design, traditional competencies in design, could bring something new and a contribution to the agenda of play and design. After the struggle the only example I found was an old piece of interactive design that is small, compact, designed in 1949. And don't worry if you cannot read it because the title of this piece is Unreadable Book - because it's not supposed to be read; it's a game, a very sophisticated play with colour and pages and not written linear narration. It's designed by a designer called Bruno Menari who has been working something like 91 years. He has appeared this year at 91 years old. And he has always worked with this kind of notion of play; that is, an idea that you can take in existing artefacts and existing techniques of narration - the book - and play on it in a very open-minded and sophisticated way. So these and other examples that I brought - here are the examples that I found of something that is an attitude to play that comes from generating and creating new ideas over a traditional medium, like the book. There is another piece of design from Bruno Menari, again around the theme of the book. This is a collection of postcards where he was cutting the sun with the scissors inside the landscapes. So it's a kind of game with the physical materiality of something like a picture, a postcard. And then there is a kind of game in the first cover. The book is called Kisses and Bye-bye, but the subtitle is exercise in escaping. And very literally there's a kind of castle with a small window and a rope and you can escape from it. But moreover you can escape out of the book, out of the cover of the book. So there is a double play: there is a play, literally an analogy, so you want to escape. But there is also a game between the space of the book and our space, the physical space that we live. So I think these are quite nice examples on how somebody could play with old media and still have an idea of how you can 'kill the rhetoric' of a medium. I have some images from other projects by Bruno Menari. This is called An Addition to the Italian Dictionary. It's a play with language. So instead of having a dictionary with words and nouns, it's a dictionary of gesture. And it's a kind of play again around the idea of mixing different languages. Then this one is a collection of images from a book, a collection of pictures that was called From a Distance it was an Island. And in this case it's an exercise of discovery of images that are hidden inside pieces like stones. And with the words of Bruno Menari, he was saying stones, like art pieces, are unique. But they carry drawings and it's up to us to discover them. And as you see, sometimes he discovered them, sometimes he just adds some pieces of drawing. And also this is a kind of interesting mix between action, interaction and media and language. This is more of an exercise in misuse, or a treatise on ergonomics. That is, looking for comfort and a comfortable chair. And again, what we can take here is the idea that you can redesign over the design of somebody else and play with it in a way that leads to unpredictable solutions, like the next one - that seems to be the most comfortable one. So how we can match all these that we saw with what we saw in the previous days? And how we can transfer some of these experiences into the agenda of play and design? I think there are some interesting questions in the fact that Bruno Menari in his work always played with objects, with artefacts, and sometimes also with knowledge - with knowledge techniques like books. And I think it's very interesting to take from this experience the fact that he puts the idea of discovering, of creativity and of killing the rhetorics of media. I think this is something we can take and bring forward. And there are other issues that are more in the work, hidden very often, with children: that is, the fact that play is a social issue. So playing with the game role between who designs and who uses the design, playing with materials, playing with the senses, the colour, the movement, the space, the physical space and playing with narratives - as we saw in the Unreadable Book. So many of these things could be taken and connected with what we saw in the past days. There is anyway one further very important issue with which I would like to conclude that we can learn from the work of Bruno Menari: that he worked with this notion of play for 91 years. So from 1907 when he was born throughout all his work he never stopped thinking that play has a deep relation with the world and is a fundamental issue for a designer. I think that this is important to put at the end of these days, where we saw very much of high quality play as connected with the world of children and the world of games. I think if we take all the things we've seen as an element that we can put in everyday life, in grown-up activity, I think we can have a notion of a design agenda for play that is could help us a lot. That is: the idea that play should be an integral part of the design of every activity. Imagine what we saw in these days put in software for working, for living in the house, and so on. So let's not restrict the idea of play just to a marginal moment of our life where it is allowed. I conclude by taking one of the very interesting definitions that I have heard in the first days: toys and play are tools for children to learn the adult's world. And what I propose is totally shift it and say: play is a tool for adults to learn how to remain children. This is what I have learned from Bruno Menari and this is what I propose to you. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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