How can Typing express a Tantrum ?
This week I focused on the question "How can taken-for-granted technologies express queerness?", a question posed in the article I read last week by Adrienne Shaw and Katherine Sender. The question wasn't exactly addressed quite as literally as I'd like it to be, so I chose to focus on that as my main question for the week. This week I created two lists, one representing taken-for-granted technologies, and other elements of "queerness", or what I think might encompass queerness in the context of technology. I've included the list below:
I then wrote a script that essentially matched elements of tech with those of queerness at random, and generated new questions.
The three questions that it generated are the following:
1) How can Typing express a Tantrum  ?
2) How can Close Buttons express Promiscuity  ?
3) How can Computer Windows express Silliness  ?
"How can Typing express a Tantrum?" Felt like a good place to start to simply see what came from trying to modify typing to represent such a human expression. I first started thinking about technology associated with typing in order to see if I could tap into anything that might be an entry point for creating a tantrum.
Below I've listed out a few typing-based technologies:
• QWERTY keyboard
    ○ Meant to make typing faster by grouping frequently used letters closer to the sides of the keyboards (where the hands sit)
• "Texting" acronyms
    ○ Meant to speedily communicate commonly used multi-word phrases
• Autocomplete
    ○ Meant to "predict" what a user might want to type next
• Autocorrect
    ○ Meant to correct a misspelling by guessing the closest word to the misspelling
• Speech to Text
   ○ Meant to comprehend spoken words and translate them into written text
My main question became: how might we envision these productivity, efficiency-based technologies expressing the actions and feelings associated with a tantrum? First I decided to think about the physical symptoms of a tantrums and their cause.
Wikipedia classifies a tantrum as an "emotional outburst"
typically "characterized by stubbornness, crying, screaming, violence, defiance, angry ranting, a resistance to attempts at pacification". A tantrum, I could say might consists of the following:
• Unpredictability
• Increase in speed/ out of control-ness
• Resistance to pacification
• Erratic-ness
• Nonsense/ incomprehensible-ness
• Destruction (?)
Now, what might the above typing-technologies look like with these properties applied?
• QWERTY keyboard
   ○ A shifting of keys, moving away from fingers.
   ○ Sudden replacement of keys with other letters
   ○ Keys springing off the keyboard
   ○ Taking on the opposite speed of the user's hands (keys moving even faster away if the users attempt to calmly type)
• "Texting" acronyms
   ○ An erratic transformation of any string of words into an acronym
   ○ Acronyms appearing more like code for a phrase rather than corresponding to the first letter of every word in that phrase
• Autocomplete
   ○ Nonsense prediction, predicting words that don't make sense in the context
   ○ Nonsense prediction, predicting words that aren't real words, but rather strings of characters
   ○ A prediction of negative words
   ○ A rapid cycling of words
• Autocorrect
   ○ Automatically correcting any and all words to nonsense words
   ○ Choosing words at random to "correct"
   ○ Correcting words to misspellings
• Speech to Text
   ○ Blatant mistranslation
   ○ Negative, threatening translation
   ○ Nonsense translation
   ○ Translating speech back into more speech, but perhaps someone else's voice, saying something else
After thinking more about my prototype, I eventually decided to abandon focusing on a specific piece of technology associated with typing! Instead I found it more productive to try and think about typing in the context of the internet, via a text box or form, something that I think the majority of computer-users have some degree of familiarity with. To me, this felt like a good basis to explore typing from.
Below is a video of the results!
I decided to try and create a text box that essentially responds to how you interact with it. While you type, the box begins to shake, the size of the font changes, and words and phrases such as "UGH!" or "I'm BORED" are typed at random, interjecting the user's typing. At it's most furious, the background changes colors rapidly, the box shakes uncontrollably, and the content of the text both is illegible. This felt like I was able to capture a tantrum, and others seem to think it also felt that way, and that the experience provoked a pretty intense reaction of frustration and anger.
The takeaways are still not totally apparent to me just yet. While the experience was jarring and not something I had experienced before, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. How might experiencing this on a day to day basis change the way I reacted with the internet? Would there be a way to calm down the text I had generated? After doing a bit more research on tantrums, it sounds like they stem from an inability to cope with the situation, resulting in a meltdown instead. Interestingly, a site called parents.com suggests that parents try and give their children their full attention and be mindful of their need to be an autonomous person, with needs and desires. "Look for opportunities to point out his good behaviors, even the small ones. The more favorable attention he gets for a desired behavior, the more likely he is to do it again." Who knows if I should be taking parenting advice from a site called parents.com, but alas, I chose to think more deeply about tantrum prevention according to their tips. How might I praise the text I type for doing a good job of appearing on the page? What might that look like? Ultimately I think this research sent me down the rabbit hole, and I don't quite know what to make of it. Something about it does feel fruitful, I think I need a little more time to fully piece it together.
The big question that comes to mind: should I be creating technology that mirrors human behavior?
I don't have an answer to that, and think this week I should probably do some research on this subject. Â
After struggling to interpret my work above, I wanted to do another deep dive on why exactly I'm choosing to focus on this question. I've dumped my brain out about this below:
I want to see if actively destroying the system that most technology is based on might change the way we engage with it. In "[In Situ] Art Body Medicine" Zack Blas writes about queer technology as necessity to counter a society increasingly defined by technology. He asks "Or, is there a subcultural technology that offers empowering, subversive structures and processes to all bodies, producing a freedom that exists as fact—a freedom that is foreign to no one?" How might creating queer technology, specifically that subverts or resists these power paradigms, carve out a space for all kinds of oppressed people to find safety and freedom in their existence? When thinking about destabilizing or disempowering, my first question revolves around how I might create in order to take power away. After reading another interview with Zack Blas, it became clear that technology is rendered "powerless" when it is no longer useful. Blas also writes "I think Queer Technologies wants to work in the interstices of useful and useless, or to find new uses through the useless. Importantly, this is not about deconstruction, it is about use, about doing something, experimenting with new ways of doing and making things happen." The system that I refer to above casts out "useless" as un-useable. In this week's thesis adventure, I plan to focus on the "useless" first. How might I strip certain features of usefulness? This week feels more about the experimentation, meaning, what might com from this? I think the weeks prior will hopefully be able making sense of the useless and how I might "find new uses through the useless".
In order to think more about human-like technology I think I definitely need to do more research on that. I also want to do more research specifically on "useless" tech, to see what others have done and have to say about it. I plan to check out the internet mostly, but I plan to also contact any designers or artists who might be able to help. Lastly, I've been thinking a bit about "Chindogu" meaning strange/curious tool or device, a practice created by Kenji Kawakami of making useless or mostly useless tools. While I don't know a ton about it, I think it might be interesting to research to see how it might benefit/ the overlap with the queer tech I'm trying to design.
I plan to document this research in a section in my online notebook entitled "research", and also bookmark the articles, text, and literature I find on either Zotero or Are.na. I hope this week can be research-filled, but I'm also wary of getting too deep into research.
Thinking about who my research might impact still remains a difficult question. While my question might seem pretty academic in nature, I'm wary of it becoming that, as I'm not someone who really ever felt truly comfortable in academia. So, I don't think the audience is folks in academia, but I'm hoping it'll be accessible to perhaps, young people. Truthfully, I'm struggling to come up with 5 different people that my design is for, but I think young people feels right. I know personally growing up I really heavily relied on spaces like Tumblr that allowed me to express myself and discover who I was and in some ways, continue to be at the time. Of course, Tumblr became more commercial, ended up limiting people with new rules, and users started to drop off, not feeling like it was quite *their* space any longer. I hope at the very least the tech that I end up building can create a system that isn't incentivized by the need to grow larger and create more efficient, productive blog systems.
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To those that feel trapped by their technology, but compelled to use it nonetheless,
I certainly feel this way. I grew up totally enamored by the idea of technology, hoping that I could one day feel powerful using it. Perhaps you felt this too, and today, you feel the ways that this vision has never quite manifested. Yes, technology is "more powerful than ever" but it's never really helped empower you. Instead, you feel that it's using you in the name of success for faceless entities. You have a hard time putting down your phone after scrolling for hours, the systems you use don't quite recognize the person that you are, or perhaps they aggressively try to categorize you into a neat box. Perhaps if you're like me, you feel let down.Â
I'm interested in breaking down this system, and while I recognize that it's a giant task, IÂ plan to start small. What might a world of personal technology look like that doesn't rely on us, for example? How might we redefine what's "useful" on an individual level, veering away from productivity, efficiency, speed. What would it look like to interact with something that like you, is socially anxious, is gentle when you're feeling particularly vulnerable, or unreasonable when it hasn't had its need met? I'm not quite sure how to answer these questions just yet, but I'm curious to see what might come of it.
Write to me to tell you about your story! I'm so curious…
Though I've peppered my week's reflection throughout this blog post, I wanted to close out this post with a brief summary. I believe I've gotten closer to the *why* but I still don’t totally understand the *how* or even the *what*, and feel a bit thrown off by it. I understand that the thesis process can sometimes become increasingly confusing as you get more detailed, but I'm definitely having a hard time. My goals for this week are to continue to research, and perhaps think more deeply about my project in the context of how other people have thought about this subject. I plan to do more secondary research and hope that that informs a new project for me to create by next weekend.
