2 6 . R E L A T I O N A L D E S I G N
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E M O T I V E P R O X I M I T Y
Study Abstract I remember few episodes of Ellen Degeneres show that often made into the popular page of YouTube videos. The videos were titled “Best of Ellen Scare,” and compiled montages from her show when she scared her guests and production crew while filming their reactions. The Ellen Degeneres Show is undoubtedly popular with one of the highest rating among day time talk shows in America. Though the show has been on television since 2003, it wasn’t until the uploads on social media that the show has gained new set of audience responsible for most of the show’s subscribers on Youtube, making her one of the biggest brand in entertainment. As a subscriber myself, I came across a segment of her show where she explains how her contribution to Youtube started with the desire to share fail videos (videos depicting situations with unfortunate outcomes, as getting hurt or falling off something) she enjoyed with other viewers on Youtube. Surely it worked, and people enjoyed what she shared. For me, it posed an odd question worthy of exploration: why do we enjoy watching other people getting hurt?
Interesting enough, “people getting hurt” was listed as the second recommended search term on Youtube, with over 227,000 search results. In order to understand why fail videos are widely watched and shared, I decided to conduct a study using a fail video of my own.
The “Fail Video” Experiment A random selection of people were asked to be an audience to watch a fail video, which served as a stimuli in this study. The video shows a man falling off and injuring himself while attempting to do a flip. The audiences were filmed while watching the video, highlighting their facial reactions to the stimuli (the video) for further analysis.
Findings: Findings from this experiment are paired with research on empathy and ideology of relationalism. Visuals from the experiment is shown on the next page.
• Watching other people react identically to a situation is a comforting restoration of order, unity, and togetherness. Viewers filmed together had tendency to check each other’s reaction and react collectively.
• People enjoy the element of surprise, because in a culture defined by knowingness and ironic distance, genuine surprise is increasingly rare a spiritual luxury that brings us close to being human.
• When the presentation and settings of the stimuli are authentic featuring relatable common products and household objects - people relate and show further interests with the stimuli (e.g. inquiring about the subject in the video, etc.).
Study Conclusion Findings and results from this experiment demonstrate the empathic drive discussed earlier in this thesis, that we have the desire to belong and be together. The constant trend in these fail videos may be due to the fact that we are subconsciously looking for a medium to express our shared
value and create solidarity. We are a collective
society, and we exercise this in viral videos and Internet trends in a digital age. Our reaction and response can be influenced, enriched, or altered by other people, specially towards people we relate with.
In a broader sense, we give an importance to the relational nature in being human. We are subconsciously aware that a huge part of our feeling exist and function as a relational entity, and we prefer to interpret existence, nature, and meaning of things in term of their relationality, instead of absorbing them as self-standing entities. To some audience, the stimuli carried more meaning and memorable quality because they were asked to join the study, to some, the stimuli was more impressionable because they were experiencing it with their friends. This study shows that emotional influences from those around us can enrich our exposure experience to the stimuli.
Emotive Proximity In terms of sociology, proximity underscores the human closeness and relationship. This study presents findings based on proximity of more than one audience member in physical nearness that suggest emotive influences on each other towards a shared stimuli. This phenomenon will be called emotive proximity - the ability of proximity between two or more individuals to manipulate, influence, or create feelings that we adopt the viewpoint of the person next to us. Emotive proximity can be a used to generate a stronger and deeper emotional impact, and can be a subtle yet a powerful persuasive tool to encourage audience to respond on an emotional level, rather than considering facts when faced with decisions post-exposure to the stimuli.
3 2 . R E L A T I O N A L D E S I G N
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V I S U A L P R O X I M I T Y
Study Abstract I recently finished interning at a high end fashion brand, where I filled a position in their creative team. One of my main responsibilities was researching and collecting product images to present what the competing brands are putting out in market for the next season. Going through products from a multitude of luxury brands, I could not help but be overwhelmed by the nonsensical high price tags that came with some of the products such as a plain t-shirt and a metal key holder. While knowing I will never be inclined to purchase a 140-dollar t-shirt, at the same time, I was amused at how value can be perceived differently for different individual.
People value a wide range of objects, activities, goals, careers, and pursuits.When asked what is valuable we include things like, a nice day on a beach, hanging with friends, spicy Indian food, a fast car, lots of money, and good music. The list is infinite; value has a boundless subjective quality, and it is this subjectivity that allow business to separate value from price. Like that of the t-shirt example, brands practice value added selling. Although a well established sales technique to raise a profit, value added selling can be time consuming and a difficult task because the technique relies on slowly building on and imbedding the value of a product and service to the customers.
Exhibition of High School Genius To demonstrate the subjectivity of value using the principle of proximity, this study aims to recreate a situation showing influences to value perception by visual closeness of two subjects with extremely different social-cultural value. In order to recreate the situation, I collected 20 paintings resembling the artistic style of those paintings by the famous and accomplished historical artists for an exhibition, except the 20 paintings are done by random high school student. The value of pantings from both sides carries a polar opposite value in social-cultural aspect and in artistry of the painters. For exhibition, the 20 paintings were matched up and labelled with names of the according historical painter of similar artistic style. This information was given to the audience only after they have completed the exhibition. Selections of example are shown in the next page.
Findings: Findings from this experiment are paired with research on empathy and ideology of relationalism:
• Prior to being informed, people showed no difficulties assuming the paintings are works of historical painters, and not of high school student, and was able to enjoy the exhibition in the same capacity as viewing original and authentic works of the historical painters.
Findings: (contd.)
• Regardless of the vast differences in value, people related the paintings with the name of the artists due to two factors: stylistic similarity and physical nearness of the painting and the artist’s name.
• Value is a product of affection and desire. People with lifestyle and career involved in artistic field expressed stronger impression of loss following discovering the facts.
• Value is a product of vanity and self-worth. When faced with two options, people prefer relating themselves and their decisions with the option that carries a higher social-cultural worth, which represents value upheld by the mass.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
JACKSON
POLLOCK
PABLO PICASSO
ANDY WARHOL
Study Conclusion The study supports that value is a highly subjective element open to changes and interactions with other elements that might present itself in near proximity, much like the Picasso’s name next to a 14-year-old Jessie’s painting. The study highlights how visual proximity can manipulate the subjective accounts of value, leading to arbitrariness, preference manipulation, and value elitism. Due to the power of preference, the perceptive value of twenty high school paintings exceeded their inherent value. Aside from visual proximity, the study also points out that in order for preference to occur, two subjects must also share high similarity in a criteria in accordance to the social-cultural worth.
Visual Proximity Proximity in visual perception have been widely studied in design since The Gestalt Principles developed by German psychologists during the 1920s. Usually these principles explore the formal interactions of visual elements in close proximity to one another such as the relationship of figure and ground, but not a lot explores the subjective quality of two visual elements placed near each other, and the cognitive psychological effect it can produce. As mentioned earlier, we oftentimes are captive with false assumptions in thinking we know how the world works. This study underscores preference manipulation through visual proximity using subjective quality of value, proposing an alternate approach of manipulating the value rather than finding the value itself, as a faster and possibly a cheaper solution.
3 8 . R E L A T I O N A L D E S I G N
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T E M P O R A L P R O X I M I T Y
Study Abstract In a digital age, everything is a rush. Everybody from mobile developers and web designers to customer-relation marketers spend countless hours and resources to reduce unwanted time such as the loading screen or simply waiting in line. Mobile developers, for example, are obsessed with speed because it can be crucial in usability and efficiency. Regardless of all the beautiful design and engaging content, users can stop using the app because loading screens are in between.
In the third study, relational design is explored through proximity of time, but to study time, it is important to understand that the way human perceive time, or the illusion of time, is independent of the actual time itself. For example, time spent with pleasant experiences may seem shorter than an equal amount of time spent with unpleasant experiences. Ultimately, how we perceive time may be even more important than the time itself.
In “The Truth About Download Time� published by User Interface Engineering, Christine Perfetti and Lori Landesman began a research that let users rate the speed of ten different websites over a consistent modem in order to find out the relationship between site -
speed and usability. The research findings confirmed their hypothesis that slower website will be rated with lower usability; however, what was interesting in their finding was that the actual recorded loading time of some websites was longer than the ratings given by the users. Profit and Landesman writes that they found no correlation between the actual download speed and the perceived speeds reported by the users. They found a strong correlation between perceived download time and whether users successfully completed their tasks on a site. It seems that, when people accomplish what they set out to do on a site, they perceive that site to be fastest. This confirms the way humans perceive speed can be completely independent of the actual speed itself.
So the question truly isn’t how do we control the time, but how do we control the perception of time? In order to shed a light on its capability, I decided to present a case study showing the effect of resolving temporal issue through perception of time in commercial setting.
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No More Waiting at The Houston Airport Executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted. Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
Exerpt from “Why Waiting is Turture� by Alex Stone The New York Times (2012)
Findings: Findings from this experiment are paired with research on empathy and ideology of relationalism:
• The case of Houston Airport supports that psychology of queuing is often more important the statistics of the wait itself.
• Occupying the time with walking to the baggage claim feels temporally shorter than unoccupied time of standing in line.
• Although in fact an extra labor, the added distance does not become an supplementary issue because it is a seemingly meaningful task in the objective to complete post-landing procedures among other tasks such as security check and getting the baggage.
Conclusion It can be said that the Houston Airport struggled trying to find a solution through reducing the wait time. While hiring more staff created financial loss, shifting their attention to occupying the wait time successfully resolved the customer-relation issue while avoiding the loss in other areas and gaining a more positive impression with airport visitors at the same time. Filling up the unused or unoccupied time with seemingly meaningful tasks can give an illusion of experiencing no unwanted time at all, removing negative feelings that can build up towards the source of the unwanted time.
Temporal Proximity With high capability of smartphones today, we are able to stay connected at all times, giving us a freedom to get a lot of tasks done faster and easier. Yet somehow, we seem to find less and less time to relax and catch up on that book that has been sitting on the bookshelf collecting dusts. What seems like a time saver is in fact giving us more tasks to do in between. An ease of shifting through various applications you love and availability in sharing information doesn’t allow a lot of time left to stay unoccupied for long. This principle works similarly in commercial settings and can be a successful strategy when implemented correctly like in the case of Houston airport. Offering a seemingly meaningful tasks one after another halt the chance of boredom, further confirming the tasks as meaningful and progressive to the next task or the final objective. This is also why we often find mirrors next to elevators or the reflective mirror-like elevator doors. The idea started during the post-World War II commercial boom, when the sudden spread of workforce led to complaints about elevator delays in high-rise office buildings. The rationale behind the mirrors was similar to the one used at the Houston airport: to give people something to occupy their time, so the wait will feel shorter. With the mirrors, people could check their hair or slyly ogle other passengers.