A GESTURE OF CONSENT (updated proposal)

My thesis project in Transdisciplinary Design is an investigation of the uses and effects of positive touch and the potential of touch as a respectful way to negotiate intimate boundaries. The current form of this project is essentially a "gesture of consent", a sort of secret handshake for initiating further layers of intimacy. 

I believe that this gesture could have several potential applications, two of which i would like to explore in the next month:

1) providing college students who have been inundated with multiple standards of what constitutes consent with a simple, non-verbal (and less awkward) way to verify and establish mutual consent.

2) providing victims of sexual assault and physical trauma a meaningful and unambiguous way to explore their boundaries with new or continuing partners, potentially as a therapeutic tool to reclaim a sense of agency in intimate physical encounters. 

My research in a design capacity has been to 1) reflect with artistic tools on the bodies of knowledge that exist around equal, reciprocal touch in the fields of psychology, sociology, literature and philosophy, and then to 2) enact those reflections in public, interactive contexts. Previous/ongoing iterations of the research include

1) sculpture (the SECRET HANDSHAKE BOOTH, the HANDSHAKE GLORY HOLE, the HANDSHAKE PEEP SHOW)

2) performance (interviews, hand games, a HANDSHAKE MASTER CLASS) and

3) video (JAZZ HANDS, GIVING CHANGE, GIVING TURNS).

Service Blueprints

The products of service (Lara)

Touchpoints: the material evidence or material systems that support the service performance

Channels: the medium through which users access the service touchpoints

Servicescapes: The physical surroundings/ambiance of a service experience

Service ecologies: Service ecologies aggregate touchpoints, channels, actors & systems of a given service including people, organizations, depts, devisions, everything around the actions of interaction. 

Service Blueprints:

a 'glorified timeline', about mapping time, defining interactions & poistioning touchpoints & channels

a time-based matrix, in the X-axis is time, Y-axis is USER-PROVIDERS-VISIBILITY-INTERACTIONS

Lines on Y-axis:

tangible evidences materializing service

a. interface line

actions by user

b. interaction line

actions by service employees mediated thru touchpoints

c. visibility line

actions by service providers to facilitate touchpoints

d. internal interaction line

third parties, etc

Johnathan Kolko

interaction design is a possible redemption for designers as form-givers. 

INCIDENTAL COLLABORATION

serendipitous meetings moving into full-on collaborations

BUT! I'd like to redefine incidental collaboration as an operational definition of the small rule-based interactions that people use to move around through & into spaces with each other. 

INCIDENTAL COLLABORATION: meeting a colleague from another department, getting excited over the water cooler about each others' work, creating a full-on collaborative project out of that

ALSO, 

INCIDENTAL COLLABORATION: playing chicken with someone on the crowded subway stairs

Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes

Slow design & attention

creating spaces for attention, slowing down to perceive more fully

design for slowness... design for mindfulness.... design for attention.

#slowdesign

ALLEGORY

Under what circumstances can a necessarily individual story with individual characters function to represent collective processes?

-Frederic Jameson

a grammar of social connectivity

create a series of experiential exercises that draw attention to already existing connections to others & the emotional opportunity content of those connections

Werner Herzog on the impact of film/image

Werner Herzog sez, in the documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, that a film never started a revolution, but it does provide a grammar of images that people can communicate in to organize themselves into starting revolutions.

FIND QUOTE, WATCH AGAIN 

Putting the project in perspective

key question:

How do the physical collaborations we enact in the every day connect us to each other & to larger social systems?

Can drawing attention to small, universal collaborations between strangers(?) via artistic tools & environments create awareness of & investment in collective experience?

Personal, emotional & intimate intervention, via interpersonal means, with impacts on individual conceptualization of group membership & global change via seeding ideas into the minds of people who have some impact on the intellectual conversation around social design & policy?

Now -> Next -> Future

the existing conditions (in the US) of disconnectedness, hyper-individualist thought, apathy towards the systems to which we contribute, ennui, a sense of helplessness, facelessness of the larger system, a lack of emotional connection to the larger group (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities)

simultaneous atomization & connectivity

next: 

bring people into emotional attentional contact with the mechanisms of the social systems that keep us together

future: 

people can act more often personally with an understanding & regard for the larger scales of their social effect, 

an intimate emotional awareness of the connectivity that exists & act with regard to it in order to better

physical analogues of social interactions, a series of designed meetings.