Thesis Document Outline

1) Introduction

a) Technology is increasingly used to mediate reality

i) More insidiously (?), personal technologies are being used to mediate the self, define what is right and wrong in a bodily context

b) Storytelling aspect of thesis

c) Theoretical grounding

i) Prosthetics as augmented human

(1) Prosthetic impulse

(2) Augmentation as medical

(3) Augmentation as social

ii) Cyborg as a critical construction

(1) Donna Haraway – “A Cyborg Manifesto”

(http://www.egs.edu/faculty/haraway/haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto.html)

(2) Allucquére Rosanne Stone - “How I learned to love my prosthesis”

(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v002/2.1stone.html)

iii) Prostheses as metaphor for bodily technologies

(1) This is something that seems almost self-evident… I need to play with the flow and how my argument is going in this case

d) Bodily technologies versus wearable technologies

i) Automobiles become an extension of the body – “he almost hit me”

ii) Cellular phones are objects that we feel naked without

iii) Laptops are repositories of much of our information and are perhaps the closest thing to many of us

e) Self/other, empathy, holistic design

i) Why do I think that it’s useful to critique technological design in the art context through “product design” –Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology

NEED A PORTION OF INTRODUCTION BEING ABOUT GENERAL TECH DEVELOPMENT SO THAT I HAVE SOMETHING TO BE CRITICAL OF

2) Research Context

a) Prosthetic impulse

b) Critical design

c) Hertzian spaces/design noir

3) Prior Work

a) Kelly Dobson

i) Adds organs to the body to reconfigure the layout of the self

ii) ScreamBody reconfigures emotional expression, storing inappropriate responses until an opportune moment

b) Komboloi—Near Future Laboratory

i) A device that is built to mediate particular emotional needs

c) Kate Hartman – this device is for you

i) Her devices

(1) Muttering hat is a space for reflection on the self and the self’s output

(2) Gut listener allows reflection on and connection to inner spaces

(3) Heart on the sleeve is an indicator of emotional state

ii) These are soft objects that makes one reconsider what it means to use technology in personal spaces

d) Andrew Schneider

i) Experimental devices for performance—fundamentally seek to augment the total work of art – Gesamtkunstwerk

ii) I similarly want to build objects that explore the idea of everyday life as a performance—perhaps considering prosthetics as the devices that make actors look like other people… building devices that disguise us as who we really are?

4) Previous Work

a) Dead Wringer

b) Body Audible

5) Emotional Prostheses

a) Materials, goals

i) Goal is to make objects that themselves are extensions of modes of the body

ii) Materials should be generally what materials are “medical”… I tried to restrict myself to metals, plastics, and rubber. The wood in the alienation device is an outlier and one I need to frame differently. Bodily prosthesis versus furniture prosthesis versus environmental prosthesis?

iii) Objects themselves are kind of ambiguous in nature: they don’t have an easy narrative of what they “should” mean

iv) This is an obvious place to work in a description of design noir

b) objects

i) Anxiety prosthesis

(1) An opt-in prosthesis for emotional expression/display

(2) Leverages a kind of natural gestural control

(3) Natural, animalistic metaphor for expression

(a) Discomfiting design makes and imposes anxiety as the user represents constructions of the self

ii) Alienation prosthesis

(1) An “always on” prosthesis for grounding in space using simple display

(2) A simple indicator of presence, and absence

(a) Think about how this embodies and represents the multiple valences of alienation—self from self, self from other, physically and technologically

(3) (be sure to think about the idea of the keychain and what it represents in terms of bodily representation—does being able to turn off the keychain mean that this is not an always on prosthesis?)

iii) Insecurity prosthesis

(1) A tethered weight for situated comfort

(2) Concept was something warm, weighty, substantive

(3) Design goals versus feasible execution

(a) Embodying insecurity

(b) Water versus safety/expertise

6) Process

a) Building as a problem for me during my time at ITP

i) Struggled with myself as much as with my projects

b) Process blog as a means of creating obligation

c) Mostly a materials study

i) Carpentry, boxes, sanding, smoothing, repetition

ii) Mold-making, casting, silicone

iii) Mechanics, considering motion, flow, fluidity

7) Conclusion

a) Personal satisfaction with devices built

i) Satisfying aesthetically and functional(?)

ii) Lockean ownership, “mixing your work with something”

iii) Creating versus mixing with existing?

b) Viable criticism of existing technological systems

i) User feedback, commentary from others

c) A kind of catharsis evolves alongside the objects

d) “Building your own therapy”

8) Appendices

a) Images of process for each object

b) Vanity shots of each object

c) Links to movies and website documenting in situ testing

d) Diary entries? Stories? Maps? Think here about using the techniques of the cultural probe as a method of creating plausible everyday design spaces for art objects (an interesting inversion of usual use)

e) References to works I mention?