🗓 December 2021
During our Community Engagement course, we found a Repair Party that took place over the weekend in Sant Marti. We decided to go with a broken speaker and use this event as a starting point and make connections with the community. We showed up at the repair party and had conversations with the volunteers as they helped fix the speaker, which helped us gain insight into the challenges and perspectives of the repair community.
With this experience in hand, we planned our design intervention around the theme of a repair party; but instead of repairing an existing device back to its original condition and function, we decided to "re-pair" a device in relation to the identity and needs of the user. The "Re-pair Party" consisted of three parts. First, was a survey with a series of questions that prompted the participant to reflect on their identity and their frustrations with the device they brought to re-pair. Secondly, we aksed the participants to re-imagine, draw, and craft a new device that would be better suited for them. For crafting, we prepared a variety of simple but different materials that provided options to build with. Lastly, we asked the participant to embody the use of the new built device through a series of acting exercises. The use was prompted to act with the object and then as the object with a partner.
The outcome of this workshop was satisfactory. As expected, we recieved some outputs that we could not have imagined or created. And at the same time, a lot of the human-machine frustrations were consistent and relatable across participants. A difficulty we came across was the disconect and awkardness of the participants in the embodiment activity. Because we were asking participants to do something imaginary and physical, it created some barriers that we weren't able to overcome in the short amount of time. After synthesizing our outcomes, we decided that adding more structure to this final process to match the familiarity of previous activities (survey and crafting) would help the participant ease in and feel comfortable, and thus produce better results.
Re-Pair Party
Our collective interests within the meta-human group span accross the spectrum of human-technology relationships including emotional tech, soft robotics, data privacy, phygital identities, and interfaces. With several days of discussion regarding the intervention, we came upon a common interest of obsolescence and relevance of technological devices in relation to our personal identities. This topic brought up some important questions, how do the functions of our technological devices define us? How do they affect or change us? Can we change them to our needs?During our Community Engagement course, we found a Repair Party that took place over the weekend in Sant Marti. We decided to go with a broken speaker and use this event as a starting point and make connections with the community. We showed up at the repair party and had conversations with the volunteers as they helped fix the speaker, which helped us gain insight into the challenges and perspectives of the repair community.
With this experience in hand, we planned our design intervention around the theme of a repair party; but instead of repairing an existing device back to its original condition and function, we decided to "re-pair" a device in relation to the identity and needs of the user. The "Re-pair Party" consisted of three parts. First, was a survey with a series of questions that prompted the participant to reflect on their identity and their frustrations with the device they brought to re-pair. Secondly, we aksed the participants to re-imagine, draw, and craft a new device that would be better suited for them. For crafting, we prepared a variety of simple but different materials that provided options to build with. Lastly, we asked the participant to embody the use of the new built device through a series of acting exercises. The use was prompted to act with the object and then as the object with a partner.
The outcome of this workshop was satisfactory. As expected, we recieved some outputs that we could not have imagined or created. And at the same time, a lot of the human-machine frustrations were consistent and relatable across participants. A difficulty we came across was the disconect and awkardness of the participants in the embodiment activity. Because we were asking participants to do something imaginary and physical, it created some barriers that we weren't able to overcome in the short amount of time. After synthesizing our outcomes, we decided that adding more structure to this final process to match the familiarity of previous activities (survey and crafting) would help the participant ease in and feel comfortable, and thus produce better results.