Oct. 14 - Oct. 21, 2021
Partners: Kiesha, Ramya, Rylee, Sofia, Zhihan
Brief: Design a way to express the value of boredom.
Research methods: Directed Storytelling and Prototyping
With this brief, I was immediately stumped by the word "value." What could possibly be the "value" of boredom (something which I dread and do everything in my power to avoid)? When experiencing boredom, I feel agitated and anxious as my brain rapidly fires through all the to-do lists that have been lying around unattended. And yet, hovering in the background alongside all these worries is the awareness that many of these pressures are imposed by our modern capitalist society and the attendant mandate to constantly be producing something or improving ourselves in some way. So, perhaps, could boredom actually be a natural human state or a "modern affectation," as the brief states?
Fracturing of Attention
John and Alaistair also brought up the attention economy and how our current digital climate no longer allows for boredom. Social media apps are constantly vying for our attention and profiting from every click. Rather than responding to a need, these companies have in fact created an entirely new hunger for constant dopamine hits from minute pings of digital "connection."
Situationist International
In thinking about the atomization of society and the amount of time spent on social media that could instead be used toward collective action, I wanted to delve more into the Situationist International for some conceptual ideas in which we could ground our design process.
Made up of Marxist artists, thinkers, and writers who had grown weary with the state of society under capitalism, the Situationist International (founded in 1957) sought to stage interventions in everyday life that expressed their own desires and the desires of the city. They wanted to embrace play and reject work as part of their revolutionary strategy to resist capitalism's hold on society. Part of this idea of play was the idea of the "dérive," or drift, where one would let the colors, sounds, and environment guide your passage. After researching the Situationist International, I could now understand how boredom might lead to a state of "cognitive dérive" and that it could in fact serve as an escape from the capitalist strictures of the modern workday.
Directed Storytelling: Finding Commonalities in Our Experience of Boredom
At our first group meeting, we asked one another about our own experiences of boredom and the ways in which we fill our time when bored. Some of the answers included absentmindedly scrolling through our phones, drawing, and eating. We thought back to our childhood and how we could gaze at the clouds for hours on end or invent our own games. We realized that we all shared similar ways of reckoning with boredom and also had similarly shortened attention spans after the rise of social media.
Ennui or Situational Boredom
We wanted to be careful about differentiating between existential boredom/ennui and situational boredom. In the article "Criticism: Benjamin and boredom," (2003), Joe Moran quotes Patricia Meyer Spacks by saying that "boredom is usually seen as a temporary and trivial state," whereas "ennui is often characterised as ‘a state of the soul defying remedy, an existential perception of life’s futility.’" Meyer Spacks points out that this distinction is both class and gender specific, since ennui is more likely to be experienced by "those who can delegate the tedium of mundane tasks to their wives or servants, and have the leisure time to dwell on unfulfilled promise" (Moran, 2003, p. 169).
This led us to thinking more about work songs and the ways people have dealt with situational boredom in the past.
Escaping Boredom: Sea Shanties and Work Songs
We also thought about repetitive work and how people have found ways to reckon with boredom, such as Scottish women creating folk songs to sing along to while working with wool. In many ways, this "solution" to boredom could lead to a sort of flow state.
Flow States
After our tutorial, we started to think more about flow states and how many people describe this state as being "out of time."
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the 8 Elements of Flow include [5]:
1. Clarity of goals and immediate feedback
2. A high level of concentration on a limited field
3. Balance between skills and challenge
4. The feeling of control
5. Effortlessness and ease
6. An altered perception of time
7. The melting together of action and consciousness
8. The autotelic quality of flow-experiences
Meditation
We realized that our experience of time with boredom is similar to that during meditation. In both states, our thoughts are in an uncontrolled state and allowed to wander. This imposition of boredom may in fact lead to time for reflection and internal conversation.
Benjamin discusses this as well, when he notes how a rainy day may dampen the overstimulating attractions of city life and lead to a sort of Proustian 'memoire involontaire'" (Moran, 2003, p.172-173).
Compression vs. Expansion
For a conceptual basis, we focused on the terms compression and expansion when thinking about our dive into the subconscious with boredom. This led us to think about camera lenses and the process of focusing in on a subject, similar to how our mind lands on something after drifting for a while.
Pabitin
Eventually we thought about the actual mechanisms of how our brain experiences boredom. It seems that several options float around in our mind and we land on one that interests us. Some of us envisioned an umbrella of tree branches surrounding our head. For visual inspiration, we thought of the Filipino toy, the pabitin, which directly translates to "rack of goodies." In this children's game, participants try to pick up small items hanging from bamboo sticks above their heads.
Prototyping
Taking the pabitin as our visual cue, we created a prototype with different activities hanging from them, such as a book for reading, banana for eating, and different balloons that held unknown activities. We wanted to have the balloons there to represent activities that we come across by chance.
Presentation and Feedback
Being Wary of Dichotomies
Perhaps the conceptual foundations could be chaos and clarity rather than compression and expansion, but we also wanted to be wary of imposing dichotomies. Al made the point that boredom is much more fluid rather than cut and dry. Other things to consider were different thresholds of boredom and how we might express these.
Speculative Design
Tonicha liked the playful aspect of our prototype. She also suggested that we look into speculative design. Our prototype could become a sort of "choose your own adventure" type activity, but instead of being able to choose, what would happen if you were force-fed "solutions" to your boredom? There would be a question of control where the activities would be fed onto the user rather than the user initiating the process by pressing a button.
With the key ideas of speculative design and non-dichotomic frameworks in hand, we were ready to embark on our second week of the project.
Bibliography
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2013, May 10) shanty. Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/art/shanty (Accessed: 14 October 2021).
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. HarperCollins.
Elpidorou, A. (2015) 'The Quiet Alarm', Aeon. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/life-without-boredom-would-be-a-nightmare (Accessed: 15 October 2021).
Hemmens, A, & Zacarias, G (2020) The Situationist International : A Critical Handbook, Pluto Press, London. Available at: ProQuest Ebook Central. (Accessed: 23 November 2021), page 8.
Moran, J. (2003) 'Criticism: Benjamin and Boredom', Critical Quarterly, 45(1-2), pp.168-181.
Scotland Info Guide (2019) History of Cloth Making and Waulking. Available at: https://www.scotlandinfo.eu/history-of-cloth-making-and-waulking/ (Accessed: 14 October 2021).
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