tinsel-o-matic – an Artifact of Understanding

This is a project where Christmas ornaments fall and break in response to unanswered phone calls. The amount of detritus is a direct translation of the attempts to "connect." This project reminds me of Hiroshi Ishii’s poetic user interfaces, an innovative use of an emotionally laden commercial object to create a whole new sense of interaction between people.

[The project] employs banal materials in a particularly novel, even subversive, way. It does not address known problems but instead "confounds" routine interactions, bringing a new level of awareness of what it means to "miss" an opportunity for intimacy and connection.

While an interface that breaks Christmas ornaments may seem trivial, the processes by which the team developed and installed their artifact drew deeply on participation and a participatory aesthetic. I was very impressed by the sociological/psychological orientation and research design where the team considered that collectors were, by their nature, people who "give importance to objects as a fundamental part of their life and identity, [and] would…provide…rules of the artifact itself." That is, when trying to find out how an object is endowed with importance, find people for whom objects are already endowed with importance—and ask them about it!

I also think that this project will engage users/visitors to the installation in a particularly compelling way. This is a modest project, but for some people at PDC, could be a paradigm-shifting one.

Leah Lievrouw, Professor, Department of Information Studies, UCLA