I was originally thinking about doing one of two things for this week’s assignment:
1) a control board game where I would have a panel full of various buttons, knobs, displays, and the like and create a group puzzle game where a group is trying to find the winning combination of settings to complete the puzzle, but one person at a time. One player enters the room with the board and takes one action (flips a switch, presses a button, etc.), then the board gives some sort of feedback to let the player know if they were going in the right direction with their action. Then that player would switch places with the next player in the group, and as they pass each other, the first player can say one simple sentence to the second, to hopefully give them an idea of what to do next to get the box towards the win state. Thought it would be a fun social experiment / team building exercise while also tapping into everyone’s natural inclination towards flipping switches and pressing fun buttons.
2) Another idea was an enclosure for a different project of mine that’s been sitting on the shelf, the Deathwatch. I’ve been wanting to redesign it for a while, to make it waterproof with a clear enclosure that would still show off the cyberpunk guts. Then I realized I didn’t have enough time and rather than continue the trend of half-finishing my assignments, I should double up with another class assignment.
So it was great that this week I had to make a memorial for Designing for Discomfort. Since the prompt for that was to make a memorial that would exist in a physical location and bring attention to an important topic you feel goes under-noticed in society, I knew I wanted to make it about mortality and impermanence. I figured I could do a spin off the Deathwatch and make it a physical installation as opposed to a wearable, but still inspired by the same quote from G.I. Gurdjieff:
"The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ … of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them..."
So I decided to stick with the idea of giving an expiration date to the user, hopefully setting them up to think about what it would really feel like if that was the true day of their death. I wanted to sort of trick people into getting that message by having them blindly interact with a seemingly fun game only to have that twist at the end. I also thought it would be better to make something interactive and light as opposed to a memorial that was very heavy and uninviting. So the box experience was:
Users see the box, buttons and display lit up, with a message “Press One”. The colors of the message (“Press” in white and “one” in green) correspond to the colors of the giant arcade buttons to the top and bottom respectively. Hopefully that’s enough leading to get them to choose and press a button.
Then a random assortment of binary “this or that” questions are presented in the same color structure. There are twenty different pairs that could be displayed (“teeth/toes”, “daddy/zaddy”, “PB&J/pizza”, “3 kid/3 $$$”, etc.) and after they make 6 choices, the display reads “look below”.
The display and a noise leads them to look on the front of the box, where a small receipt is being printed. Once it’s done, they rip off the paper and receive their message, which reads “Congratulations! You have: X years, Y months, and Z days left to live. What will you choose next?”
The choices are totally arbitrary, the arduino doesn’t even record which button was pushed, it only increments a countdown until they’ve made 6 choices. I wanted to get across a funny, absurd flavor for what living is like, you make all these stupid choices, and then it doesn’t really matter either way, because you’re going to die no matter what. The death-date prediction was based off the Deathwatch statistical sketch, but I adjusted the probabilities to make it skew toward sooner deaths. It’s not as interesting when 90% of the people live until they’re 81; I wanted people to really have to think, “What if this is right and I only have 9 more years left to live? What then?” Which I hope is guided by the last message of “What will you choose next?” — I usually don’t like being so overtly self-help, but I felt like the receipt was disconnected from the buttons without that last part. I was excited to be able to use a mini printer for the first time, and hopefully they can keep their forecast like a fortune cookie.
The build went nice though, it was my first time doing stuff with arduino since coming to NYC since I waived PComp, and I was worried I would be rusty. But I got it all done in one day, learning two new libraries (for the RGB matrix and the mini printer) and remembering how much i hate debouncing buttons in the process. For the enclosure I was originally going to go to the container store and do that thing we saw in class where you can laser cut the top and just slide it into a premade box, but because of the snow last week, I had just bought my first pair of waterproof boots and realized the shoebox was perfect. I love using cardboard, so I was really stoked that I could re-purpose the box instead of just trashing it and buying a different one. I thought about laser cutting it, but figured that was way over-engineering it since I’ve gotten plenty far with just an X-Acto knife in the past. That turned out to be perfect, and I cut the button holes so precisely that I could actually screw in the buttons to the cardboard. That got me a little hot and bothered. The wire-hell inside has yet to be addressed, but that’s only because I worked entirely from home and all my jumper wires and stuff like that are at school, so I’ll hopefully be able to clean it up before class tomorrow.
Overall, really happy with how it turned out, and excited to leave it up tomorrow during the day and see what people think of it (and their inevitable demise).
