#structured nothing

Penelope

Penelope is an endless weaving loom. It is my final offering for Futuring and Speculative objects. This project was inspired by the ideas that were developed in the co-creative workshop I hosted. Penelope is a tools fostering structured nothing.

My classmates and I were warned early on in our thesis process that we would encounter many rabbit holes.  My research has taken me in many directions and down some amazing rabbit holes. Some of these have been big, others small. Some fruitful, some less so. In one case, citing my research became a hunt down a rabbit hole itself. 

I came across the following quote in a presentation several months ago: 

"The quality and content of a person’s life is the sum total of what they have paid attention to over time.”

It was attributed to the author Henry James. When I looked into the quote further, to find out exactly in what context Henry James wrote it, I reached a dead end. After much hunting and some gracious sleuthing from others, it looks likely that William James, the psychologist, rather than Henry James the author is responsible for this quote. In William James’ The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 he writes, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

Here he is speaking to a similar point. We have a choice of where to focus our attention. When we think of all of the distractions that fill our days, the chatter (Das Gerade) Heidegger wrote of, it is important to be reminded that we do have this choice. I am yet to find a context where William James (or Henry James) wrote the exact quote that was originally so inspiring for me. Regardless, the sentiment is one that has carried through much of my work. 

I created this short video about attention.

At 9:00 pm on a Wednesday evening, I set out on a Brooklyn bound L train armed with bags of bubble wrapped tools for structured nothing. Over the course of one train ride I handed out 136. The results were pretty magical. You can see clips from the experience here:

Do nothing more often.

Let your mind wander.

Structured nothing is the power of choice. It is the power to take the time, sometimes, to focus on nothing. The quality of our lives is the sum of what we pay attention to over time. When we shift our attention to doing nothing amazing things happen, our minds wander, we daydream, we come up with brilliant ideas. 

This past week I went out and tested my structured nothing experience in public. Again, focusing on transitions, I chose to test my experience inside the New York City subway. I moved away from an initial idea of setting up a stationary booth of sorts where people could engage in structured nothing, and instead decided that the experience should happen on the move and have an ephemeral quality.

I made over 50 bubble wrapped surrogate phones and set out on a weekday evening. In this iteration, the phones simply had bubble wrap on one side and a hashtag on the back. I set out to test the logistics of the experience. The intention of the experience is to shift subway riders attention for just a moment and get them to actively focus on doing nothing, structured nothing.

Leading up to this test run, I had lost my excitement for the project and was questioning wether it was enough of an engagement. Pushing past my own self criticism and getting out to test with real people proved to be incredibly beneficial. I was able to see where there were gaps in the experience, but the biggest benefit was validating the value of the simple engagement.

The phones were successful in that people needed little to no instruction as to what to do with them. Bubble wrap is great, and people immediately want to pop the bubbles. Subway riders are generally hesitant to engage with or take anything being handed out on the train, but once people heard the sound of the popping following me down the train, and realized that I was not asking for anything in return, the vast majority were happy to take the phones and pop away. I even had one woman work her way through the car to catch up to me to thank me for giving making her realize she needed a little break.

Overall, it was a very successful test run. I now need to solidify my script for handing out the phone and for answering questions. I also have decisions to make in regards to feedback, deciding if there should be a call to action other than a hashtag.

Considering how absence could be shared with a larger or public audience, I designed a series of collages to illustrate the mood of a user journey through an experience of absence. In urban settings, we are constantly bombarded with input and distraction. A simple intervention and experience has the potential to break through this bombardment, even if only for a brief minute of time. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, moments of transition are prime areas of opportunities for the work of my thesis. In considering a location for my experience, I have been looking to stops along people's daily commutes, such as subway platforms or cars, or bus stops. I created a brochure for my potential experience of absence. This brochure advertises an experience where a facilitator guides passersby through an activity that is intentionally 'boring' or absent of focused engagement. These are activities of structured nothing. 

In a conversation I had with Brian David Johnson, a writer and futurist at Intel, he used the term ‘structured nothing’ to describe moments where you intentionally do nothing. These can be taking a shower, staring out of the window, or going for a run to clear your head.

I have prototyped two possible structured nothing activities for this experience. Both are designed to take approximately one minute to complete. The first is a standardized test where there are no questions, allowing the participant to simply fill in answer bubbles. The second returns to my earlier prototype using surrogate phones. Participants are provided with a surrogate phone lined with bubble wrap. The bubble wrapped gives the participant a mindless activity to occupy their hands with for one minute while their mind wanders. 

For the past few weeks I have been in development of a designed experience. This experience is centered around the concept of absence. The subtraction of just one element from an experience can heighten our senses and shift our attention to other elements of the experience. Starting back in September, at the beginning of this thesis year, I implemented a minute of silence at the beginning of every class session. The minute has received positive feedback from my classmates and instructors and has become a valued aspect of each class. The absence of sound for just one minute at the beginning of a class serves as a powerful transition from one part of our day to another.  

I have been exploring ways to spread this daily ritual to audiences outside of my program. An early prototype considered how one might gift a minute of silence to someone who is not present. Most of us have our phones on us at all times throughout the day. They can often be catalysts for distraction rather than value. These two qualities make the phone a prime opportunity for intervention. Monopolizing on the fact that most my friends typically respond to texts in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, I reached out to several people via text in order to gift them a minute of silence. The instructions were simple and the positive responses validated the concept and value of gifting a minute of silence.

In a next iteration, I turned again to my classmates as test subjects. I created surrogate phones, to the dimensions of each classmates make and model of smartphone. Each phone was wrapped as a gift and labeled with their names. The gift of a surrogate phone was presented as an exchange for setting their actual devices aside for the duration of one class period. This was an exercise in removing the distraction of one's phone during a time when one's attention should be on the experience at hand. Providing the physical surrogate served as comfort to alleviate some of the anxiety of being separated from one's device.

Instabored

This week I was challenged to create something that represents the work I intend to present based on the continuums I defined last week. The key intentions I'm trying to move towards are: Inclusive vs. Exclusive, Discover vs. Teach, Public vs. Private. 

Instabored is a poster I designed for the setting of public bathrooms. It aims to bring back boredom to the toilet. Instabored is a printed poster of the entire Instagram User Agreement. Even in 2012, 75% of Americans reported using their phones in the bathroom. Rather than distracting ourselves on our phones, Instabored provides an opportunity to rediscover boredom.

Boredom has become a key focus of my thesis and is even more on my mind this week because New Tech City, a technology podcast on WNYC, just yesterday launched their biggest project ever, Bored and Brilliant. Their project aims to get people to rethink their relationship with technology, (specifically smartphones for their project) and tap into the creative potential of boredom. They are doing this through a week full of podcasts with accompanied daily challenges. 

Studies on boredom have shown that the performance of boring tasks have creativity-boosting effects. Test subjects who were given the boredom inducing task of copying the phone book for 15 minutes, outperformed a control group on a standard creativity test. When groups were given the more passive boring task of simply reading the phone book, they outperformed both groups. Passive boredom, which leads to mind wandering, fosters creative and productive boost. 

We eat, sleep, commute and even go to the bathroom with our phones. As New Tech City points out, the average mobile user checks their phone 150 times a day. Much of this time, especially time spent waiting in line, standing on the subway or sitting on the toilet used to be spent letting one's mind wander and being bored. Instabored aims take back our time on the toilet from distraction, and instead fill it with boredom.