3rd semester
andreea vlad
magnus luca
michael rasmussen
eduard arnautu 1
table of content
problem area and problem formulation p3 introduction p4 the concept p5 communication theory p6 design with intent p7 conclusion p8 sketches p9 paper prototypes p10 mockups p11 appendix p12
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problem area and problem formulation
These years the use of wireless technology based on radio-frequent radiation
(microwaves) is skyrocketing. Mobile phones, smart phones, DECT phones, tablets, wireless toys, baby-alarms, routers and so on. The technology was introduced with not much thought given to safety measures, it seems. Even though it’s ill effects have been known within the military industrial complex for nearly a half century. The initial safety measures were based upon the fact that wireless or radio frequent radiation is not a highly ionizing radiation band, which means that it doesn’t create any noticeable thermal effects in it’s interaction with the body. The initial safety measures were decided by engineers who have certain knowledge of radiation but very little when it comes to the effects on the delicate and yet to be fully grasped connections of the body’s ecosystem.
So it came to be that wireless technology was propagated as the preferred cheap
and convenient technology of communication, preferred over the more expensive yet safer technology of fiber-optics. It has been shown time and time again that the telecommunication industry have had a heavy influence in studies and investigation concerning it’s own product, constantly deeming it safe for use and that conclusive evidence towards the technology posing a health threat is yet to be found. But, groups of independent scientist have long been doing studies which show that the technology has adverse effects, the problem being these studies never received the medias interest. After many years of fighting against the powerful arms of lobby information tactics, a congregation of scientist (Bio-initiative report) have managed to build a platform which is being noticed by officials in a few governments and health institutions alike. Select countries have now taken legislative measures toward the technology and limiting it’s exposure especially in children environments, children being extra vulnerable to its effects.1
How can we influence small but useful behaviors and attitudes in regards to use
of mobile devices and WIFI technology, as well as inspiring awareness and knowledge acquisition on the topic of wireless radiation and its health threat?
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See ‘Facts‘ in Appendix, p.11
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introduction
When discussing what sort of app to develop we were focusing on the requirement
of “human exchange”. What topics would be interesting to explore and communicate. Mainly our ideas circled around humanistic concerns as well as experiences. The concept of awareness making about wireless technologies was consolidated after watching the movie “Resonance – beings of frequency”. Based on the idea that a marketplace could be a forum of human exchange, we interpreted the exchange object to be the currency of knowledge.
Since our assignment is to create a web based app, we are in effect telling people
that what they are doing while interacting with our product, with their smart-phone’s or laptop’s wireless connection; is toxic and bad for them. How do we reach our audience with this inconvenient message with tact and delicacy (rhetoric). So that they might be inspired to find out more about this shadow side of modern technology? In the process of forming our application we would like to take into consideration and advantage of geo-location, which we have been learning in this module.
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the concept
To visualize the electro magnetic fields that surround us, in particular the microwave
band which is the one wireless technology uses. The local fields of the device can be measured if there is an on-board magnetometer, which reads the surrounding field. This is of course at the moment a native only option, but here we project in to the near future where such permissions may be given to a web app. This can be visualized on to waveforms presented graphically. There is readily available databases which list mast data such as position and type, where from range can be calculated. This can be combined with the reading from around the phone. If extended further the app could query for a network reading.
There will be two different visualizing options to sell the experience of ’seeing the
invisible’. 1. A top down Google map, 2D. Connected to a mast database, the view opens at the location where you are at, and displays local mast ranges. You can then see where the greatest saturation of local radiation is. 2. A 3D visualization of local field influence seen through the devices viewfinder as measure by its on-board magnetometer. It could be combined with mast readings and possibly with network information of hot spots. But the main focus would be the local reading from the magnetometer. The 3d visualization can either be tracked by an approximation from the magnetometer or tracked via 3d geometric information from Google maps. The experience would hopefully lead to interest in what is being seen, which can be easily over-viewed in the ’info’ section and further researched in the ’blog/ community’ section.
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communication theory
Our potential and wished for user base permeates all social divisions, ages which of
course doesn’t make it easy to approximate preferences and attitudes so to distill a suited visual design. We have approached this from a sort of ’golden mean’ of design, or just to follow best practices of design in general: to make the interface clean and easily readable, honoring gestalt laws.
The meat of the application is visualizing of electro-magnetic fields, a feature which
plays into the concept of ’experience economy’ and the view of the personas wish and need for personal and memorable experiences. Personal as it the users immediate personal but invisible space is illuminated and memorable in the sense that the visualizations will portray a turbulent field that with connected knowledge should leave the impression of an invasive nature. In the community section there will be further value for the user to build and learn the habitus and adapt to the doxa of this newer field, which is truly heterodoxic in society at large, due to the area’s suppressed information defended by established scientific/ media outlets.
Even though our user-base is close to global we can imagine some key personas,
defined through the lense of some of Pierre Bordieu’s terms:
The ’app-head’ : Interested in all the newest apps with novel use of technology. Likely
not interested in any specialized information which could be connected to the app, but is rather connected to the habitus and doxa of gadget minded fields.
The electro-sensitive person would have a great interest in illustrating the reality and
environment which makes said person sick, yet most probably is met with disbelief and ridicule due to the low awareness on the subject. It would work as a great tool for introducing the ignored EM world to both his or her close friends and family as well as broader fields of daily navigation.
The opinion former/ blogger who has a steady growing base of followers. He could
be a voice of the creative class, having a solid background in science or relatively rich in cultural capital, yet represents the creative class’s humanistic / ideological values that
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permits him to not be scared off by the wall of dissuasive evidence competing with serious independent studies out there.
The technology & scientifically interested of a concerned nature: Although he has
habitus in respect of scientific authority, he also has a developed social conscience; thinking about his child’s future. This element of conscience will produce internal conflict between the rules of habitus connected to being up to date in the scientific field and the intuitive sense that the technology may not be something to ignore.2
design with intent
Design with intent is a very useful tool in designing solutions for any kind of media and
we found it especially useful in our process of finding and resolving the problems given by the concept that we wanted to develop for our app. Starting with identifying some behaviors of the specific target audience, we applied the suited lenses to find some design solutions to help us in the process. Through this exercise we identified 3 behaviors that could match some of the problems that we want to solve with our concept: careless sleeping in radiation, carrying the phone close to the sensitive body areas, lack or poor knowledge about damaging radiation from WiFi devices. The most common reasons for the above behaviors are: lack of knowledge, lack of interest or skepticism towards the subject, badly informed by the media and science authorities. The lenses that we found suitable for our concept are: Perceptual lenses, Interactive lenses, Security lenses and we experimented with other various lenses so we can explore the possibilities that we had. From the Perceptual Lenses we chose to explore the mood: by creating a mood using the phone camera to scan and detect the surrounding radio waves in variable dramatic display; from the Interactive lenses
See ‘Bordieu terms in Appendix, p.13
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we used the stimulation and feed-forward principle: a stimulated report of daily radiation use - generated from momentary glimpses recorded through the magnetometer and GPS. From the Security lenses we chose to explore the ‘where you are‘ principle: based on the location (GPS) the user can receive information about the level of radiation in that area through WiFi connection, information stored in a database made by other users that pinned the location on the map (e.g. using Google Maps). Using these design techniques and principles helped us to put in perspective the user experience and the needs and focus of the user, giving us some very useful solutions to the initial problems. Moving forward, we started to create sketches and to develop user scenarios that led us to design the mockups and some more accurate prototypes.
conclusion
Our prototype of an awareness app has worked out to be going about the work of
creating awareness in a way that could be said to utilize the cognitive lens of rephrasing and renaming, toning down the alarmist warning notions that activists tend to use. By focusing our presentation as an experience of the invisible, combined with toned down relaxed information in the sideshow and community section, we have provided a relaxed setting to appreciate the controversial and troubling information. Whether or not this approach will be successful can only be proven by real world tests.
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sketches
We found the sketching phase very useful
in our design process because it gave us solutions to some basic problems, such us layouts, elements positioning, interactivity, architecture, look and feel of the app. We got a lot of important and useful information from this practice and we took some decisions in this phase that remained available until the working prototype.
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paper prototype
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mockups
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appendix
Literature Bourdieu on Status, Class and Culture, Andy Blunden, May 2004 PIERRE BOURDIEU, Loi&776;c Wacquant Design with intent: 101 patterns for influencing behavior through design, Dan Lockton with David Harrison & Neville A Stanton, 2010 Creating Persuasive Technologies: An Eight-Step Design Process, BJ Fogg Resonance – beings of Frequency – James Russell / John Webster www.bioinitiative.org/ www.helbredssikker-telekommunikation.dk/ Facts
The facts are that constant exposure to wireless pulses causes stressing of the cells;
increasing free radicals, decrease in melatonin production, stress hormones production is increased, all effects that can lead to cancer at worst, and altered behavior at it’s mildest. The problem is that few hear about this before it’s too late, since the media is not covering what has been called one the 3 greatest problems of our time, the other two being bad diets and chemical saturation of our society.
People are still in this polycentric age, very much guided by what the mainstream
media tells them to worry about, as well as being reliant upon the consensus stories of established science, which as implied earlier are very much influenced by industry interests. So how do we address this problem to the unaware users?
There is little use in taking the approach of a fired up activist, as it seems only fellow
activists are prone to listen. Nor does it seem to be an intelligent approach to approach a userbase with a message of discarding the use of wireless technology, as it has been so firmly installed in people’s daily routines that it would probably create a reaction of ignoring the message. We are constantly being told to worry about this or the other problem, so that we increasingly actually shut down these signals that tell us to worry. One way of describing
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this psychological mechanism is the concept of ’Normalcy Bias’(see below).
The normalcy bias, or normality bias, refers to a mental state when facing a disaster.
It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparation. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation. Source WIKI.
Even though ‘normalcy bias’ pertains to emergency cases it can also be used to
describe the immune response to signals that tell one to worry. We have been saturated with too many conflicting alarms from media that we more or less turn off when being confronted with another danger. Terms of Pierre Bordieu Fields: Either broad or smaller units of informational/ social space which individuals traverse in different contexts. Habitus: The internal values and norm systems, cultural habits or attitudes - The choices people make and the opinions they have. People act in accordance with the field’s requirements. Doxa: The hierarchical values of a field, how to act. Being heterodoxical would be challenging or outright opposing the values, norms and rules of the field. Capital: is a term denoting a field or individuals talents in the sense of interchangable current. From the classical sense of economic capital, to cultural and symbolic capital. To acquire capital in either sense requires a basic support of economic capital.
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http://solidar.dk/KEA/COLORADIO_APP/index.html
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