Dead Man Humming

DEAD MAN HUMMING Critical Design Prototyping 2017

An infraordinary journey of an extraordinary musical instrument.

Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

CONTENTS

06 The Marionettar

Who pulls the strings of our lives?

Christina Jørgensen, Federica Dell’ Antone, Lukas Cibula

38 Four for One Need for greed

Naomi Roovers, Louise Lindvig Thelander

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Sounds of Afterlife

Teenage Dirtbag

Nicklas Strauss Meyer, Andreea Vlad

Malene Gam, Katrin Lisa Olafsdottir, Alberte Løkken

Is death death?

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Skål bag

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Humans Anno 2017

Molekitar

Caroline Ritsing, Karen Plesner, Maria Weis

Peter Svarre, Rune Lauritsen

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58

One Hit Wonder

The Avocado Guitar

Maria Madsen, Line Havaleschka, Natalie Ramild

Simon Takatomi, Simone Larsen, Vladimir Garabas

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98

The Axe Guitar

The Naked Guitar

Kristian Gadegaard, Sebastian Langer

Tuva Nesse, Maria Brandt Pedersen, Ira KjĂŚr Rasmussen

We all live in the sublime

Ice ice baby...

In the beginning there was nothing

Music is for rookies

Smash your guitar everyday

How to play a woman

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

INTRO

In the following you can read essays about critical design and see photographic documentation of prototypes that a group of bachelor students from the Copenhagen school of design and technology, made in january 2017.

The course spanned over three weeks, where we worked with various prototyping methods, critical design theory and videodocumentation.

Don't expect functionality, purpose, convenience or target group research from these prototypes - they are an attempt to make us think about issues that bubbled up during the course, and should essentially be seen as rhetorical artefacts.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Walton & Jesper Balslev

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

“Critical Design aims to really push the boundaries of design and to reconsider the elements of fiction.�

Helly Ben Hayoun

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Sebastian Popa - Alcoholibrium

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Sebastian Popa - Ashquarium

Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

TUNING MARIONETTES The metaphor about life

Authors: Federica Dell’ Antone Specialisation: Communcation Design and Media

What is critical design?

What is it aiming for?

Why is linked with prototyping?

talk and discuss about the topic with my group mates, thinking also about which message we would like to send through our product.

These have been my first questions when I have started this project.The first days I have struggled in order to find a definition or an example, that could help me to understand what critical design was about.

One of our most interesting reflections has been about the similarity among a marionette and a guitar: the marionettist uses the strings for controlling the movements of the puppet from above, while the guitarist uses the strings in order to reproduce a determinate sound. This has led us to think about how, our behaviour could be controlled and manipulated by external factors and by society.

Critical design seemed to me very similar to art and I couldn’t really see how it could be useful for society. In her article States of Design 4, Paola Antonelli, curator at MOMA in New York, has given some good answers to my questions.

In her perspective “Critical design does not produce immediately useful products, but it should be aimed at fuelling our preferable futures”.

In the article, she has underlined the message spread by Dunne and Ruby, leaders in the critical design field: “We need to move beyond designing for the way things are now, and begin to design for how things would be, giving tangible form to new values and priorities”.

Reflecting on this, I started to think about how this values and concepts could be expressed through a prototype of a guitar. I have started to 08

With these thoughts in mind we have started to sketch out the prototype, applying some of the design approaches given by Dunne in his book Herzian tales. We have used especially juxtaposition and dematerialisation. We used juxtaposition, putting together two different objects in order to create a new item, and dematerialisation, keeping just the main trait in common of the two original objects, the strings and the “marionette handle” and removing all the other features. After having sketched different versions of it, we have built a first rough 3D prototype using paper.The 3D paper prototype has helped us to see the potential problems that could arise when building

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

the final version . It has also given us some insights about how to build and assemble together the different pieces.

the industry. In his opinion our prototype should aim more to raise the curiosity and the interest of the people.

Once we have finished the paper prototype, we have been to an hardware store, in order to buy the material needed. For our project we have used wood, a rebar, nails, guitar strings, bolts and some varnish. At this point, we have used the tools given by Kea’s Makerlab, for cutting and drilling the pieces of wood and metal needed for building the “marionette handle”, while for the prototype base we have first drawn it in Adobe Illustrator and then we have cut it with the laser cutter machine.

Using critical design for our prototype has been a challenging and interesting approach that could stimulate always new discussions and debates, giving attention and connecting different fields apparently not connected with design.

This approach seems to give space and to support always new potential developments and connotations, rising always the question,what if?

Once we had all the pieces ready and varnished, we have inserted the guitar strings. Probably this has been the most challenging part of the all project.

Despite our attempts using different tools and approaches, we were not able to tighten up the strings properly. In the end, we have used thetrick of twisting a little bit the prototype in order to stretch more the strings. In this way has been possible to play it, reproducing a (not so tuned) sound. If we could have more resources and technical skills we would like to replace some pieces with real guitar components (tuning keys and pins...) in order tohave the strings thigh and more tuned. We would like also to shape the handles in a more ergonomic way, using a better quality of wood.

When we have start to test our prototype, asking people their thoughts about it, we realised that was not so easy to make the audience understand our point, our purpose. People with a background in art, have easily guessed what the Marionettar was about, but people with other backgrounds didn’t find the relation between the two objects. The musician we have interviewed, for example, has claimed that, he has always felt free to play and to express himself through his music without any pressure from 10

“Design at the end is a way of building up a possible figurative utopia or metaphor about life.�

Ettore Sottsass

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

THE MARIONETTAR “At first, I thought you were playing with a marionette doll!”

Author: Christina Jørgensen Specialisation: Communcation Design and Media On the first day of the Critical Design elective, we were told to forget everything we had previously learned about designing, communicating and idea generating. We were also told that many of us would not complete this elective with the excellence and grace we strived for no matter how hard we tried. During this module we would be learning based on serendipity and speculation. I was a little terrified, but also excited to take off my analytical glasses for once, let my creativity and imagination loose and see what could become of it.

The method of Critical Design is very much the opposite of the “traditional” affirmative design approach which is mainly used to identify and resolve problems. When working with Critical Design you are using design to ask questions instead of answering them. To make us think instead of thinking for us. To provoke instead of please. The following is a few of the critical approaches we became familiar with during this elective: According to Tobias Revell, a London-based critical designer and teacher, the critical method is about designing for normalcy. When designing for the future, many designers look towards what he calls a “Flatpack Future”. In this 12

future vision everybody is happy, every artifact is contemporary and works the way it is meant to.

Revell sees more value in considering the “broken” future when designing for it. The Future Mundane is a criticism of the vision of a perfect future, a more realistic perception of what the future will look like.

Today we are bombarded with design created to appeal to the rational, narrow-minded and self-interested econs within us. As an example, scaremongering as an attempt to regulate emotions and desires is based on the perception that humans are predictable and always act on what is most beneficial to themselves. According to Daniel Kahnemann, an american-israeli behavioural psychologist, design like this will always fail. Why? Because humans make irrational decisions. As critical thinkers, cognitive fallacies and bias such as Impact Bias, The Hawthorne Effect, The Decoy Effect, Optimism Bias and The Sunk Cost Effect are all occurrences we must take into consideration when designing for human beings.

An example of critical design could be Carl DiSalvo’s Adversarial design which is a form of political design. DiSalvo speaks about engaging the public in political issues through compelling

“Essentially, streaming has offered labels the ability to pay themselves twice while reducing what is owed to artists.�

Prince

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

technological items. He wants to question the conventional way of addresses political issues in order to improve the process through design that conveys disagreement and confrontation.

An example of adversarial design could be Mark Shepard’s CCD-ME-NOT Umbrella. The artifact is an umbrella covered in LEDs which are only visible to CCD surveillance cameras. When walking with this umbrella under CCD surveillance, the lights 1 The Marionetta Christina Jørgensen 20/1-2017 Dead Man Humming (Critical Design elective) will distort the captured images of the camera while also hiding the person using it. The umbrella is a commentary and critique on surveillance in society and a promoter of privacy.

The idea of using critical design as a means of conveying a political or social message was one we would pursue further. The process of doing our own piece of critical design started by individually thinking of three issues in society we thought would be interesting to work with. Then the ideation phase would begin. By using the Lotus Blossom method and SCAMPER method we ended up with 8 designs which could convey our chosen message and chose the one we could agree on. The next step would be to sketch our idea and show it to people in order to get feedback. After some re-considerations we would begin developing our prototype.

We landed on the issue of control within the music industry and the fact that many artists don’t have control over the production, sales and usage of their own music. Due to services like Youtube artists are not always credited for their music as they should and even though musicians are protected by law, they do not always receive commendation and income for their work. Services like Spotify and other streaming services are the cause of the extinction of LP’s and CD’s, which leads to a drastic drop in income for the artists. We wanted to create a critical prototype of a guitar which exhibits this issue and tries to give the control and power back to the artists.

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Here came the idea of the Marionetta - a juxtaposition of a guitar and a marionette doll. With the same functionality of a guitar, the way the Marionetta is held and played makes the whole difference. The connotations we get from the marionette doll is “controlling something” and “pulling the strings”. The way of holding the guitar gives the player this sense of control and string-pulling. A feeling which should reflect on the way the artist feels about the music he/she produces.

After creating our prototype, we were set to bring it to the streets and test the idea. As we played our Marionetta on the streets of Copenhagen a stranger came up to us and said: “At first, I thought you were playing with a marionette doll!

Now I can see it’s an instrument.” When explaining the idea behind the Marionetta, she agreed on the connotations of the marionette doll and the fact that musicians do not get enough credit for their work these days. Unfortunately, we did not find the time to approach any musicians who could test the Marionetta and tell us how it feels to play. It would have been optimal to try out the design on people who has a knowledge within the field and who could endorse the idea. On the other hand we have tested if the message is understood by the target group - the consumers.

As a conclusion, the method of critical thinking opens up an alternative way of conveying a message. Although initial research and testing will always be a required part of any design process for me to insure the quality of any design I create, the idea of focusing on the message itself and the strong and alternative way of conveying it definitely gave me something that I can use in my further communication work.

THE MARIONETTAR Who pulls the strings of our lives?

Authors: Lukas Cibula Specialisation: Communcation Design and Media Marionettar is a juxtaposition of a marionette and a guitar with the social commentary on the issue of social control, shadow government as well as control within the music industry. It has been built to sparkle a debate, to ask questions, to make us think and first of all to be critical towards our behaviour and the society we live in.

We wanted to address the following issues:

Do we control society or does society control us?

Are people aware of the social control?

Do you feel in control of the course of your life?

Have you ever experienced misuse of power/ control?

How much freedom do musicians actually have in their music career?

What do you associate with power/control/influence in the music industry?

The artefact is infra-ordinary as it can’t be used as a fully functional musical instrument but the ability to make sound was inferior, the focus was on having a connotation of a puppet and a string instrument.

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We played with a metaphor of pulling the strings, playing with someone’s life where the puppet served as a symbol of a controlling and manipulative agent.

The semiotic skin of a guitar has been completely redesigned. Understanding and a basic function of a musical instrument remains but appearance is rapidly adjusted. We dematerialised the guitar body, neck and head and left only guitar strings and marionette handle.

The creation of Marionettar has been a long and troublesome process but throughout it we have learned to think critically, to celebrate failure, to improvise, and have acquired technical skills from the maker’s lab - how to operate the laser cutter, 3D printer, drilling and sawing machine, etc.

The idea of Marionettar has been born during the lotus diagram exercise when we tried to create a problem finding guitar. We looked at social issues we could point out at with our artefact.

From the race for perfection and success, and pressure under which society puts us we ended with a design which deals with the issue of a social control or hidden agents controlling our lives.

Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

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Linear Account The linear account of our project can be summarised in the following steps: -brainstorming, lotus diagram, idea generation -selection of best ideas -sketching -prototyping -purchase of materials: a wooden lath, an iron rod, bolts, guitar strings -cutting wooden laths into smaller pieces -gluing different wood parts together -laser cutting a wooden plate for guitar strings -buying a lacquer and a bronze spray -spraying the supporting rod bronze and applying lacquer on the puppet holder -sawing the main rod -tightening the guitar string on the instrument -hammering nails to cause more tension on strings -laser cutting second plate -putting two plates together -putting bolts on Marionettar -scenario for the music video -video shooting -post production and editing -writing exercises Conclusion The issue of social control as well as shadow government is very complex and in order to find answers to our questions we would have to address the problem from sociological, psychological, political and economical perspective.

However, the purpose of our artefact was not to answer these questions but to point out at the ongoing issue and raise awareness of it. In general, marionette worked very well as a critical design artefact. We observed the reaction of surprise, confusion, and curiosity. People could clearly identity the juxtaposition we created and started questioning the purpose of the object, however, they weren’t so sure how to play our instrument.

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If we had unlimited amount of time and resources, we would have cut out the whole instrument out of a ornamented wood with engraved patterns. Strings would have been professionally tightened to have enough tension to make proper sound and tuning of the strings would be done in a more sophisticated and practical way.

In addition, there would be more strings tight to the puppet handle to give stronger impression of a harp, guitar or another string instrument.

“It’s society which fashioning us in its image fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions.”

Helly Ben Hayoun

Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

HUMANS ANNO 2017 We all live in the sublime

Author: Karen Plesner Specialisation: Communication Design and Media I was going back to school after a year on maternity leave and I was nervous, exited but also a bit confused. I’d read the schedule for my elective, Critical Design Prototyping, and saw that we were going to make a music video. That wasn’t what I’ve hoped for, when I choose this elective. What was even the connection between prototyping and a music video?

I was therefore relieved when I heard the teacher explain, that the music video was another word for making a prototype of a guitar and document it.

But it wasn’t just a normal guitar – it was a guitar based on our new knowledge about critical design.

I quickly found out that my knowledge about this subject was minimal. It is a speculative form of design and it has so many layers. To get a better understanding of what critical design really is you can seek help from Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, both professors of Design and Emerging Technology and Fellows of the Graduate Institute for Design Ethnography and Social Thought at The New School in New York.

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Their A/B manifesto is an excellent tool to distinguish between mainstream and critical design. You only need to read the first two words in each column, to know exactly what the manifesto and therefore critical design is about.

A/B manifesto: (a) (b) Affirmative Critical Problem solving Problem finding ... …

Also Tobias Revell, who is a senior lecture of Critical and Digital Design at London College of Communication and the author of a blog post called Critical design / design fiction lecture finally written up (loooooong), has a very useful term of the type of design; Normalcy.

This term contains sentences like “stop designing for heroes” and “the future mundane” which is the opposite of flatpack future, where everything is perfect.

So critical design is all about designing outside the normal and inside the provocative, broken, satirical, speculative etc..

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

We started our prototyping with at brainstorm on a guitar with our critical design glasses on.

We were all drawn to the provocative part of the critical design, so with that, and the future mundane, in mind we found our idea and message; an inside out guitar, that shows how perfect your life is on the outside and how chaotic your life really is on the inside.

If we had to redo our project we would use the Lotus Blossom method for brainstorming.

We’ve sometimes been confused, as our idea has travelled from one end to another. Meaning that we’ve had to go back in our notes to be sure about what idea and message we had decided to follow. Furthermore the ideation phase would have been more smooth and creative.

It’s a perfect description of the impact bias, where people have the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.

We really would have wanted to put our prototype in the hands of someone completely outside the project. We would have wanted to see the interaction with our guitar and know if the message was clear. We would have wanted to know if our guitar had the effect we wanted. Did people stop and wonder if they were acting and appearing like themselves or if they were pretending something and telling people lies.

This research would give us a huge and important knowledge, which we could definitely use if creating the real product.

Our prototype was simple to make.

We used the laser cutter to cut out the front and the back of our guitar from a HDF board.

Then we glued some nasty pictures of intestines on the inside along with the guitar strings, that we nailed on. Strings all broken and impossible to play any sweet music on. It can only make broken and rattling sounds which matches the feeling of the inside of the guitar.

We placed a red balloon with a red light blinking inside the guitar to symbolize a stressed heart of someone not feeling good.

Afterwards we joined the front and the back together with a great cardboard like material, that you can form when it’s wet, and when it dries off it gets hard.

At last we glued lots of glossy pictures (glansbilleder) all over the guitar and gave it a layer of lacquer to give it the perfect finish. Perfect on the outside and chaotic on the inside.

Our prototype has got trails of biomorphism (the intestines and the heart), infraordinary (strings that doesn’t really work), impact bias (our whole project symbolizes someone who has the tendency to think everything will be better if he/she appears in a certain way) and semiotic skins (the glossy pictures integrates something good and perfect.

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In conclusion I just want to mention Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher (1724-1804), who described the sublime experience by dividing it into three phases: 1.

You’re confronted by something that forces you to stop up.

2.

Breakdown and chaos. You can’t immediately understand the phenomenon. A painful pause arises.

3.

Serenely! Rationality steps in and helps the fantasy analyze and understand.

We want people to have the sublime experience when they see our prototype. We want them to always have in mind that life isn’t beautiful it’s sublime.

“We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.�

Maurice Maeterlinck

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

HUMANS ANNO 2017

Author: Maria Weis Hansen Specialisation: Entrepreneurship

Are you living the perfect life?

You probably are. Sometimes. Or not. It is a hard question to answer. Because what do we compare with? And what is the perfect life?

I had an illusion that humankind wanted to show each other and the rest of the world that our lives are just perfect; that we got the perfect job, perfect family, healthy habits, good friends and that we really don’t want the world to know that it is not always like that. Even though the outside can be “oh so pretty” on social media and shown in our appearance, the inside can be something completely different. Also stress is an increasing diagnose. Do we really live a life of a pressure like this? Are we really falling apart from the inside?

These questions can be asked to psychologists, lifestyle experts and social media experts and I’m sure I’ll get some valid answers. But I want to do something on my own. So the last couple of weeks I had a course in critical design.

A critical design object will often challenge the audience’s preconceptions and expectations.

By doing that it is possible to provoke new ways of thinking about an object, its design, its use and its surrounding environment. Design has 22

other possibilities beyond solving problems, as affirmative design often do, it is also possible to ask questions, to challenge the status quo etc.

Critical design is lots of attitude and instead of methods in affirmative design it is position. So can I by making a critical design item help to highlight the question about if we live the perfect lives? I tried to glue intestines.

We started the project with a brainstorming and choose an idea. This idea grew and we got a lot of ideas how to make this string instrument that was a criteria from the teachers. When we were sure of our idea, we used a laser cutter to cut the shape of a guitar in hdf. We had to make the front side with a hole in, and the back without a hole. On the back we glued printed pictures of human intestines. We wanted the two sides to have a distance, and therefore we glued two pieces of wood together to get the perfect distance between the front and the back. We placed these on the inner side of the fingerboard. To make a room inside the guitar we had to make sides between the front and the back of the guitar. To do that we made some thick cardboard wet and formed it as we wanted it. We glued it and mounted pieces of tape to be sure it would not move. We cut the pegs of the guitar and placed them loose inside the guitar. The strings

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were placed on the inner side of the guitar and we made a heart of a red balloon, potato flour, a red bike light and rebounds. This heart was fastened by wire. On the outside of the guitar we now glued a lot of coloured scraps with and without glitter. These were mainly flowers and angels to symbolise something beautiful. At last we wanted to make a glossy effect by spraying lacquer on the finished guitar.

We could have made a glossy smartphone With this guitar we tried to make people talk about the pressure we lay on ourselves. We could have done much more, and we could have done it a lot different. Maybe a mask would make more sense. As a symbol to cover up over faces.

Or a smart phone as a symbol of the social medias. At least we should have talked to people about our guitar and the issue we think exists.

The Human Guitar The group I was a part of came up with an idea about making a guitar and use the space inside the guitar as a part of a storytelling or an issue. We wanted to create a guitar that shows the perfect outside (a Danish saying: “det perfekte glansbillede”), but when you look closer on the guitar you’ll see that the strings are not easy to see.

They are on the inside and on the inside, you’ll see the inside of the human body. There’s a true picture of blood and a fast pumping heart. This inside of the guitar is a picture of a body that wants to show the world that this person has a perfect and happy life. In the real world, the human body is exposed for stress and pressure because we want to be the best part of ourselves and show the whole world that we can do everything and that we are in full control over our lives.

We wanted the guitar not to play happy and good music, but instead strange sounds. Therefore we placed the pegs in the guitar and turned it inside out. We wanted to ask questions to the outside world and we wanted people to be aware of this issue.

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A guitar and a human heart What we did was to materialize some of the concepts in critical design theory. We used Dunne’s term “biomorthism”, as we merged a guitar with a heart and intestines from a human being.

I would say that our guitar turned out “infra-ordinary” (Dunne), because it doesn’t work as it is supposed to any longer. It is therefore a bit less than good in it’s meaning to play music. On the outside of the guitar we can put the term “hedonic asymmetry”(Kahnemann), because we want to show positive thoughts about life. On the inside of the guitar “impact bias” (Kahnemann/ Elster) shows because of the tendency for people to over-estimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states. Also Dunne’s term “fusion” is showed in the guitar as different materials are merged to create a new meaning. In this example the blood, the heart, intestines, scraps and the guitar shape.

A realistic picture If we had all the resources at our disposal we would probably make the guitar in a 1:1 scale.

We would give the spectators a realistic picture of the subject and to get the point better across by using a real human heart and real intestines from a human body. Also using a real heartbeat to make more senses into the item will make a good point.

If we were to continue the work we would have taken the guitar to a public place and asked what people think about the guitar. We would choose a public place to meet lots of different people to get (hopefully) lots of different answers. We would ask them what they think the symbol of the guitar is, if they understand it, if they think that this is a society problem and try to start a discussion about our appearance and our human values.

Don’t take it seriously From this project I now fully know what is meant by the term “critical design”. By letting myself try this process and work with critical design, I

think I will see more critical on lots of products to be designed. I am a bit more secure on the laser cutter and know that every decision has to be thought through and justified. Mostly because the symbolic can be found in even the small details.

So this guitar is not meant to be taken seriously – the question behind is. So now I hope that you’ll think about your own and others appearance both online and offline. And also give space for the less perfect life to hit your followers and your appearance in general. If you are familiar with critical design, I hope this make sense. That was at least my intention.

“Critical design can never be truly popular, and that is the fundamental problem. Objects that are critical of industry’s agenda are unlikely to be funded by industry.”

Anthony Dunne

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

THE HUMAN BEING

Author: Caroline Ritsin Specialisation: Entrepreneurship Maybe you have already heard about critical design or maybe you have not. I see design and especially critical design as a way of being able to see yourself through a piece of art by bringing your own thoughts, history and knowledge about society into it. In the following I will do my best to guide you through my thoughts on critical design. So let us begin with a quote that is important for this essay.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision - Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962) Right before I sat down to write this essay I was sitting with my phone. I posted a beautiful photo on Instagram from my walk on the beach in Rågeleje earlier today. A photo of a deserted and foggy beach with the text “Perfect Sunday”.

And why did I do that? Did I really have the perfect Sunday? The day started when I woke up too early with a sore neck and an empty fridge. It was raining and I had to take the bus to Herlev.

Not even close to being what I feel is the perfect Sunday. But yet as I walked on the beach in that foggy weather I did have the feeling of a perfect Sunday. But this situation only shows a snapshot – because my Sunday began far from perfect. But why was it that I did not post a photo of 26

my empty fridge? Why does my generation only post the perfect idealised photos?

There are many ways to answer these questions… I could talk too a psychologist, who could give me an insight into why people act and think as they do. But I could also talk to a SoMe expert.

My generation grew up with technology and social media and it has therefore become a part of our everyday life. Everybody has a digital track and a digital life – which is the way to communicate today. But that also means that we end up living our lives through our phones. In order to understand the various generations and the way we choose to present ourselves it would make sense to talk to a lifestyle expert. By combining these three experts it will show us a picture of our challenge. It will create an understanding, but it will also raise a number of new questions such as: How will the next generation be? How will our society change? And how will this generation evolve with family life as their responsibilities increase? The questions will never stop, but experts can help us find answers and understand these.

And how did we get our thoughts to a real process that could result in a critical design prod-

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as an element in our work, and we choose to make handbag for a teenage girl, that could contain beer and hide it from her parents when she was going out. Because many teenagers that young are not allowed to drink, but do it anyway.

In a sense what we did, was materialize some of the concepts in critical design theory:

We drew up some thoughts of how our guitar should look, and what it would do. Then we made our guitar parts in illustrator, and went to the lasercutter and made it happen. We now had two guitar parts, that we glued together with a piece of wood in the middle to make it more stable, and to keep the shape of a guitar.

We glued fur to the sides of the guitar case. Out of fabric the guitar strings was made as shoulder handles and the last string was made of straws, to drink the beer from. At the end of the straw we placed a pacifier, so it would look like a baby is drinking from it.

Reminiscence bump - in the video where I’m playing Anne-Sofie, I try in my role to think back how I was, and how insecure I was on the inside, but how much I didn’t wanted anyone to notice, so I reacted over self-secure and loud.

What I learned from this prototype making, is how to use the machine in the future, when I want to make some prototypes for schoolwork.

Maybe I can take some it with me later on, when I have to apply for a job. I also learned a lot from all the terms for critical design, which is very useful for future work.

Infra-Ordinary - because it does not work well or it does not work at all as it should. It’s only for show.

Optimism bias - because we were very optimistic in our work and I don’t think it turned out as functional as we expected.

Impact bias - is also in play, because we want it to make an impact on youngster. And we hope it will stop them from drinking and make it look stupid. But we properly overestimate the length of the impact. And the teens will be drinking again next weekend. As I said before, the impact goes beyond a “music video”.

Packages – because it is a hiding the beer, which is the essence of our problem that is underage drinking.

Does this mean that we answered the questions, NO! The problem is much more complex, there are many aspects. It’s about being somebody, to fit in and not being excluded from the community. So if the majority drinks and smokes, then Anne-Sofie also wants to drink and smoke, in fear of not being apart of the community. So we need to make something that can change the majorities’ point of view, and not just that one teenager.

Adverserial Design – Because it’s a design that raises questions, about a cultural behavior.

We could have done so much more and we would have done it with a different point of view.

Where it didn’t just become ironic or fun, because I doubt that our project will make a significant change in their behavior, but I hope it will make them think.

It has been an interesting couple of weeks, I have learned a great deal about critical design, and already looking forward to try out some of my own ideas.

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Tactical media – We manipulated and did an event, the music video, to make a critique of todays society.

Provocation – We did it to provoke the parents and the teenagers.

“I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.�

Eleanor Roosevelt

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THE MOLEKITAR The MOLEKITAR has no strings attached!

Author: Rune Lauritsen Specialisation: Entrepreneurship In the beginning there was nothing but one big unity. Everything as we know it was unified in one single point of mass. And then a massive explosion!

From there the first of beginnings would start and the universe started evolving into an endless world of possibilities, stretching to an unimaginable size. The first bits of particles began to come together and form new opportunities, there was so many of them that man as we know today, have only discovered just a fragment of it all.

The universe was born. A place so huge that it is incomprehensible to a human being. So big that we in an average human’s lifespan never will be able to reach the most far corner of it. It was to become the biggest and yet unanswered question in human history and yet most people seem to forget how small we are. That gets you thinking. How are things made? What do they consist of?!

What is a guitar really?

How do we understand a guitar?

What is a guitar really made of?

How did we come up with the design for guitar?

Why do we like the guitar as an instrument as 30

much as we do?

Why hasn’t the guitar changed much since it first came to the light of day?

Could the guitar represent something else than it does?

Why is a guitar so good at socializing people?

Is a guitar not just a way to throw your ego at the masses?

Can a guitar show the real you?

What would the world look like with out guitars?

How would the history of music have turned out with out guitars?

There are many ways to address these questions!

We could have read the history of string instruments, and worked our way backwards to figure out the origin of the guitar, and maybe discover why it looks the way it does.

A social experiment could have been performed and maybe revealed the truth about the guitar as an instrument to bring people together.

We could have sought for answers in psychology, to try to understand why we like the guitar as much as we do or performed an anthropologic study of people’s behaviour around music.

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

We started our prototyping with at brainstorm on a guitar with our critical design glasses on.

We were all drawn to the provocative part of the critical design, so with that, and the future mundane, in mind we found our idea and message; an inside out guitar, that shows how perfect your life is on the outside and how chaotic your life really is on the inside.

It’s a perfect description of the impact bias, where people have the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.

Our prototype was simple to make.

We used the laser cutter to cut out the front and the back of our guitar from a HDF board.

Then we glued some nasty pictures of intestines on the inside along with the guitar strings, that we nailed on. Strings all broken and impossible to play any sweet music on. It can only make broken and rattling sounds which matches the feeling of the inside of the guitar.

We placed a red balloon with a red light blinking inside the guitar to symbolize a stressed heart of someone not feeling good.

Afterwards we joined the front and the back together with a great cardboard like material, that you can form when it’s wet, and when it dries off it gets hard.

At last we glued lots of glossy pictures (glansbilleder) all over the guitar and gave it a layer of lacquer to give it the perfect finish. Perfect on the outside and chaotic on the inside.

Our prototype has got trails of biomorphism (the intestines and the heart), infraordinary (strings that doesn’t really work), impact bias (our whole project symbolizes someone who has the tendency to think everything will be better if he/she appears in a certain way) and semiotic skins (the glossy pictures integrates something good and perfect.

32

If we had to redo our project we would use the Lotus Blossom method for brainstorming.

We’ve sometimes been confused, as our idea has travelled from one end to another. Meaning that we’ve had to go back in our notes to be sure about what idea and message we had decided to follow. Furthermore the ideation phase would have been more smooth and creative.

We really would have wanted to put our prototype in the hands of someone completely outside the project. We would have wanted to see the interaction with our guitar and know if the message was clear. We would have wanted to know if our guitar had the effect we wanted. Did people stop and wonder if they were acting and appearing like themselves or if they were pretending something and telling people lies.

This research would give us a huge and important knowledge, which we could definitely use if creating the real product.

In conclusion I just want to mention Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher (1724-1804), who described the sublime experience by dividing it into three phases: 1.

You’re confronted by something that forces you to stop up.

2.

Breakdown and chaos. You can’t immediately understand the phenomenon. A painful pause arises.

3.

Serenely! Rationality steps in and helps the fantasy analyze and understand.

We want people to have the sublime experience when they see our prototype. We want them to always have in mind that life isn’t beautiful it’s sublime.

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.�

Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

WE ARE ALL HERE BECAUSE STARS WERE KIND ENOUGH TO EXPLODE In the beginning there was nothing

Author: Peter Svarre Nielsen Specialisation: Entrepreneurship One of the most critical questions we can ask is how. Only by asking how, can we learn of the subject we are interested in. Lucky for us, many wise men and women has asked how to a lot of things. And each time one of the questions got answered, we took one step further to become the society we live in today. A critical mindset is important for us to evolve. But some times things are getting so hard for us to comprehend, that we seek an answer we don’t need to question further. And that answer is religion. We are at a place and with a future, which don’t have the need of a supernatural god to explain things for us. So our time has come to criticize religion and debate its influence on children and society without being afraid to hurt some one religious belief. We are not afraid to use strong language about political subjects and politicians we don’t agree with, and religion should not be protected in the way it is today. We have so much knowledge about nature and physics that we don’t need a deity to answer our questions.

Physics has a lot of great theories of how our universe is created. Professor Laurence Krauss has a theory about the concept of nothing. We know that our universe began with the Big Bang. A huge expanding where time and space got created. And therefor, there must have been 34

nothing before the expansion. But what is nothing? Krauss calls it a quantum vacuum where not even space is there. This is extremely hard for humans to comprehend. To imagine something which is nothing at all is almost impossible.

Krauss suggest that particles that pop into and out of existence created gravity in nothing, which kick started the big bang. The start of our universe which has giving us everything we have. The first stars got created approx. 50-150 million years after the big bang, and since then stars has been created and exploded in billions.

And every time a star explodes, it has created and spreading atoms out in space, which is the building stones of everything we know.

Rune and I thought it would be a cool idea to show a guitar in its smallest form. In it’s nuclear and molecular shape. We started exploring how a wood and metal molecule is constructed and which atoms it is build.

We did some drawings of the molecules and thought of a way to build them in a large scale.

We bought some flamingo balls and wood poles, which should be our atoms and connections.

With our materials we made our cellulose and

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

iron molecules. We wrote on the flamingo what atom the specific ball was.

Does that mean that we have build wood and metals in its complete molecular structure?

No! That was simply not an option for us with our time limit. Woods molecular structure is very complex, and we have only made 50% of what a wood cell is composed of. It is the same with our metal. An iron molecule is influenced by heat, pressure and much more. Therefor we made a molecule structure which is common in aluminum. The complexity of molecules is very difficult.

We materialized our concept by critical design theory. We used the M (magnify) from SCAMPER. This term is the best way to describe our work. We magnified the smallest thing in the guitar. We also dematerialized the whole guitar as on object, standing alone with its core.

The biomorphic term is also relevant for us. Biomorphic is to show things in its natural shape.

This is exactly what we did. We all consist of atoms and molecules. Therefore is biomorphic the purest form of life and elements.

If we had all the time and money in the world, we build the whole structure of wood and metal.

We would have to examine the exact metal in strings to know the structure. We would build the whole thing in the size of a football field to demonstrate and ironizes the picture of the smallest object by scale it to an extreme.

It is very poetic to look up in the skies and see the light form stars billion of kilometers away how are our ancestors. And to image that we are a part of such a vast and complex place is just as fascinating as it is fretting. So we have an obligation to keep asking how and to learn much more than we know today. Curiosity is a beautiful feature and it shall not be shadowed by religion, because our cosmic life is much more beautiful than the work of a creator.

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“The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: How did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?�

-

Louise Bogan

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FOUR FOR ONE Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words

Author: Louise Lindvig Thelander Specialisation: Sustainable Fashion Do you consume too much? It´s a hard question to answer, but I can ensure you that we are all over consuming more than we need. We buy stuff we don´t need, everyday, every week, all the time. We have money and we do not need anything, we have everything!

We designed a critical guitar, to comment on overconsumption, as a big problem today. We use the planets resources with no thought of it, bringing our home, the planet, in danger. We use resources not only from the planet, but also humans are exploited, so that our need for overconsumption is met.

We want people to stop and think about the things they buy:

“Do I really need this?”

“Do I need this in three colours?”

“Do I actually have one at home?”

“Will this be something I own in 10 years?”

“Will I even use it?”

These are the questions we want people to ask themselves, when they are out buying things!

When they want to shop just for enjoyment! Is it worth that? The overconsuming people are the ones who are fast, automatic and have emo38

tional feelings towards buying new stuff. It is thoughts that are going through the consumers mind, when they do not think much of their action, but just do, in theory it is the people of system 1. We want the people of system 1 to consider more conscious, slowly and logical instead.

System 2 would be the people that think of the planet’s resources, consider the consequences of their consuming habits, and would ask themselves, “do I really need this?”.

4 For 1 guitar is just what you need! The guitar with four sides, to play on, with nothing less then 24 strings, you will be able to play even more! Get it now, and don`t miss the offer of four guitars for only one guitars price!

It is a guitar with the “Four for one” offer, is provocative and stupid at the same time. You can never play all four sides at the same time, the comment is therefore, “you don´t need that much stuff, cause you will never use it all anyway”. We wanted to make a guitar not only with the possibility to play on it, as a instrument, but also a feel of it being a different look, than a guitar as we know it. It had to stand out, and be something that wakes your curiosity, when you see it.

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

We started our prototyping with at brainstorm on a guitar with our critical design glasses on.

We were all drawn to the provocative part of the critical design, so with that, and the future mundane, in mind we found our idea and message; an inside out guitar, that shows how perfect your life is on the outside and how chaotic your life really is on the inside.

If we had to redo our project we would use the Lotus Blossom method for brainstorming.

We’ve sometimes been confused, as our idea has travelled from one end to another. Meaning that we’ve had to go back in our notes to be sure about what idea and message we had decided to follow. Furthermore the ideation phase would have been more smooth and creative.

It’s a perfect description of the impact bias, where people have the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.

We really would have wanted to put our prototype in the hands of someone completely outside the project. We would have wanted to see the interaction with our guitar and know if the message was clear. We would have wanted to know if our guitar had the effect we wanted. Did people stop and wonder if they were acting and appearing like themselves or if they were pretending something and telling people lies.

Our prototype was simple to make. We used the laser cutter to cut out the front and the back of our guitar from a HDF board. Then we glued some nasty pictures of intestines on the inside along with the guitar strings, that we nailed on.

Strings all broken and impossible to play any sweet music on. It can only make broken and rattling sounds which matches the feeling of the inside of the guitar.

We placed a red balloon with a red light blinking inside the guitar to symbolize a stressed heart of someone not feeling good.

Afterwards we joined the front and the back together with a great cardboard like material, that you can form when it’s wet, and when it dries off it gets hard.

At last we glued lots of glossy pictures (glansbilleder) all over the guitar and gave it a layer of lacquer to give it the perfect finish. Perfect on the outside and chaotic on the inside.

Our prototype has got trails of biomorphism (the intestines and the heart), infraordinary (strings that doesn’t really work), impact bias (our whole project symbolizes someone who has the tendency to think everything will be better if he/she appears in a certain way) and semiotic skins (the glossy pictures integrates something good and perfect.

40

This research would give us a huge and important knowledge, which we could definitely use if creating the real product.

In conclusion I just want to mention Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher (1724-1804), who described the sublime experience by dividing it into three phases: 1.

You’re confronted by something that forces you to stop up.

2.

Breakdown and chaos. You can’t immediately understand the phenomenon. A painful pause arises.

3.

Serenely! Rationality steps in and helps the fantasy analyze and understand.

We want people to have the sublime experience when they see our prototype. We want them to always have in mind that life isn’t beautiful it’s sublime.

“Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.�

Elise Boulding

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

FOUR FOR ONE There is enough in this world for everyone

Author: Naomi Roovers Specialisation: Sustainable Fashion Did you also ever think that you would feel happier if you would buy that one item which you have been thinking about for weeks? Yet a week later you lost your excitement on this newly purchased good. This feeling can be connected to the law of hedonic asymmetry, which implements that positive emotions always fade over time. The constant need of refilling our happiness by buying new goods leads to overconsumption.

Consumerism is adding little to our wellbeing as well as destroying the planet, and it is not even making us any happier, according to former Greenpeace activist and dedicated waste fanatic Annie Leonard. It is “a particular strand of overconsumption, where we purchase things, not to fulfil our basic needs, but to fill some voids about our lives and make social statements about ourselves.”

During my elective module in Critical Design I have learned a few terms that can explain humans behaviour towards consumerism. As mentioned before, the hedonic asymmetry is an emotional response resulting in consuming goods. People are likely to only invest time, effort, and money in purchasing goods, if they are likely to create positive emotions. Another 42

problem is that when people are faced with the consequences of consumerism, like climate change, they take a mental short-cut, a heuristic.

This means they substitute a complex problem with a simpler one: ‘I should buy this instead of this.’ By buying green people are putting off the real issue. However, an honest solution is not to accomplish a skill of choosing the best option, but getting that product out of the stores.

The very obvious solution is to simply slow the rate at which materials are being used. However, this leads to negative effects on economies.

Therefore, the world needs to allow new industries to develop, while decreasing the consumption rates. These new industries can be renewable energy and recycling technologies. Another way to help decreasing the overconsumption is by a fundamental rise of efficiency, collaboration in production and optimal designed products.

Together with a classmate I made a critical guitar, commenting on consumerism. During this project, we did some experiments with a four-sided guitar. Considering the fact that people want to buy more and more for the least

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

amount of money and always wanting to get the best deal. This guitar gives the people a four in one deal, but is in fact not any better than a normal guitar, since you would only play one side at a time.   To get another perspective on the guitar, we asked a friend who plays the guitar to have a look at ours. He had a different view on the guitar and actually saw the four sides as useful. He explained that for every song you have to tune a guitar, but if it would have four sides, you could tune all the sides and just flip it whenever you want to play the next song.

There are many ways to address a problem, but doing so with critical designing is a good way to make people start questioning themselves. The goal is not to sell the design, but bring awareness to the viewer. Creating a hidden message can add extra value to a product, by making the user reflect on itself and provoking action.

In the end the guitar did not make the sound as we wanted it to make. But in this three-week project we managed to design a guitar that sends a message to its viewer and making them question and look beneath the surface. One thing is for sure and that is that there needs to be a change. We can’t use more recourses than earth supplies, and we are slowly running out.

I hope that this critical guitar is an inviting way of engaging others in to thinking about what consumerism is doing to the environment and to themselves.

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“There is enough in the world for everyone’s need; there is not enough for everyone’s greed.”

Gandhi

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

DARE TO BREAK THE ICE Ice Ice Baby...

Author: Line Skou Havaleschka Specialisation: Sustainable Fashion Do you know this feeling? You are sitting in the train waiting, trying to get from A to B. The first thing you do is taking your headphones on and start isolating yourself and building up the same barrier as everybody else. You need the entertainment, and you need to take distant from the other people in the train. This is what we do and this is our reality.

The best thing would be to look at your phone or if the opportunity is there, look out of a window.

If we even get the slightest hint of eye contact with anyone, it will break your comfort zone and add that awkward tight smile towards each other.

Two months ago, I began for the first time to take advantage of headphones and my music. In the past, I enjoyed the awareness and noise of everything that was happening around me when I was walking in the streets or taking the bus.

Now I can’t live without my headphones. I forgot my headphones one day and was so frustrated that I had to go and buy a new pair of very cheap ones just so I could survive my journey home.

I completely isolated myself and am depending on my own little bubble of a world.

That is why I made this complex critical design 46

project. I made a guitar with my bare hands out of wood. Well a guitar-like instrument with strings, as humbly can play. I took it to the next level and put the instrument in a bucket of ice.

You may think why ice?

I’m not saying this is a project that anyone can relate too or even understand some on the other hand might just be aware of it already. But my goal was to make a statement, a statement about the music industry.

Is the music industry melting away and starting to be forgotten? Is the music absorbing in the ice? I have made a further experiment. An experiment which is about how people react and more importantly don’t react. I took the ice bucket with the instrument to the mall. Taking an object not normally hear at home is called juxtaposition - an instrument in ice, in an unusual place gives us a completely different view of the object guitar. I was filming the whole setup and placed a little note that said: “play me”.

So there I was sitting in a shopping mall and observing people for several hours. How people were reacting to this alternative instrument, while the ice around it slowly melted away. I saw that most people simply did not dare to go near it let alone play it. But when there was someone

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

who was curious and brave enough to go there, several people followed after.

It was the most incredible observations, how people really respond to each other when we are out amongst other people and suddenly being put in a situation where there is something in front of us that we can’t understand by just a look or our first impulse.

I wondered why people were not more curious.

How these people could just walk undisturbed by without a shimmer of curiosity and continue on with their lives. We must not forget what the music industry is worth. The music is very important in our entire life - socially, culture even our DNA. The music can make us feel. They crate emotions for us like love, joy, loneliness, inspiration and especially bringing the most amazing but also the most unpleasant memories up.

Music has a huge power, an impacted that we simply can’t take for granted. This is my thoughts about it.

We crave entertainment. We must be kept entertained constantly. Therefore, we have all these various talent shows like X-factor, The voice, and different countries got talent. This is quick, easy and accessible way to form entertainment and money, don’t ever forgot the money.

We as humans thrive on shows like that we make fun of people who are bad and envy the good, we forgot that these people are also just trying. And we’ll never let them be true to them self, because we want them to be a specific type of performer, we made them stars by voting, we watched them grow and now they want to start singing their own stuff… we turn off the TV’s, forgot all about them till the next show comes on and like trusty dogs we turn the TV’s on ones again and the money comes in. They’re murdering music, a bunch of money grabbing pigs.

48

The music industry is sinking in other ways as well when things like Spotify, YouTube and Snap chat filters supports paying the new hits on their filters and for free.

Talented musicians, we forget – we don’t recognize their name or face. What we do remember are the headliners right, TOP 20 hits – the Justin Bieber’s and Katy Perry’s of this world. We only hear mainstream music, “hits”, the songs that we all know and sing along to our guilty pleasures, in that short time that they play it on the radio. We begin to lose interest in the industry, music and man - the story behind and look only at the image. When is it okay for the image to carry the artist and not the music? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

And jet the whole argument that I’m putting in front of you today, I am a prime example. I only listen to the mainstream music on the radio, I only download the one song that I know and I do watch X-factor, and within the two-month after the show is done I already forget the name of the winner. All in all if nothing else comes out of this, I taught myself the lesson about the music industry.

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOTTOM Absurdity is what I like the most

Author: Maria Madsen Specialisation: Sustainable Fashion You have undoubtedly heard the sound of a guitar sometime during your life. And you have most likely also seen one. And you have probably also held one in your hands at some point.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, you have also played one.

But when you really think about it; what is a guitar? What does it feel like? Where did it come from? What does it take for it to play?

To answer these questions, one might start with Google. But will it be able to give you the answers you are searching for? Does Google know what something feels like? What it means to feel? Google can probably provide you with the basic, fact-based answers, such as “the guitar is a musical instrument classified as a string instrument with anywhere from four to 18 strings, usually having six,” and: “A 3,300-year-old stone carving of a Hittite bard playing a stringed instrument (…) show people playing an instrument that has a strong resemblance to the guitar, indicating a possible Babylonian origin for the guitar.” And this wasn’t even Google, it was Wikipedia helping us out. And I have heard that Wikipedia is not to be trusted…

50

Instead you could talk to musicians, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers and physicists or maybe even some guy from MTV (if you think he can help you with anything).

However, what we chose to do was to start by thinking about different ways to approach the guitar. What makes a guitar? We quickly agreed that the strings are an important part of a guitar. Maybe the most important thing. Because a guitar without strings – is that even a guitar?

And how would you produce the sounds that make sweet music without them?

Okay, so now we have the strings.. What else?

The tone of an acoustic guitar is produced by the strings’ vibration, amplified by the hollow body of the guitar; the resonating chamber. So we needed that too. ‘Cause we wanted to make an instrument that actually works.

Then we thought about society. What do we see out there in the world today? We looked towards the music industry and what caught our attention was the culture of the MTV One Hit Wonders. What is this new phenomenon, where MTV Push(es) one hopeful singer to the top of the lists one month, and in the next they have forgotten all about them and moved on to the next?

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

We started our prototyping with at brainstorm on a guitar with our critical design glasses on.

We were all drawn to the provocative part of the critical design, so with that, and the future mundane, in mind we found our idea and message; an inside out guitar, that shows how perfect your life is on the outside and how chaotic your life really is on the inside.

If we had to redo our project we would use the Lotus Blossom method for brainstorming.

We’ve sometimes been confused, as our idea has travelled from one end to another. Meaning that we’ve had to go back in our notes to be sure about what idea and message we had decided to follow. Furthermore the ideation phase would have been more smooth and creative.

It’s a perfect description of the impact bias, where people have the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.

We really would have wanted to put our prototype in the hands of someone completely outside the project. We would have wanted to see the interaction with our guitar and know if the message was clear. We would have wanted to know if our guitar had the effect we wanted. Did people stop and wonder if they were acting and appearing like themselves or if they were pretending something and telling people lies.

Our prototype was simple to make. We used the laser cutter to cut out the front and the back of our guitar from a HDF board. Then we glued some nasty pictures of intestines on the inside along with the guitar strings, that we nailed on.

Strings all broken and impossible to play any sweet music on. It can only make broken and rattling sounds which matches the feeling of the inside of the guitar.

We placed a red balloon with a red light blinking inside the guitar to symbolize a stressed heart of someone not feeling good.

Afterwards we joined the front and the back together with a great cardboard like material, that you can form when it’s wet, and when it dries off it gets hard.

At last we glued lots of glossy pictures (glansbilleder) all over the guitar and gave it a layer of lacquer to give it the perfect finish. Perfect on the outside and chaotic on the inside.

Our prototype has got trails of biomorphism (the intestines and the heart), infraordinary (strings that doesn’t really work), impact bias (our whole project symbolizes someone who has the tendency to think everything will be better if he/she appears in a certain way) and semiotic skins (the glossy pictures integrates something good and perfect.

52

This research would give us a huge and important knowledge, which we could definitely use if creating the real product.

In conclusion I just want to mention Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher (1724-1804), who described the sublime experience by dividing it into three phases: 1.

You’re confronted by something that forces you to stop up.

2.

Breakdown and chaos. You can’t immediately understand the phenomenon. A painful pause arises.

3.

Serenely! Rationality steps in and helps the fantasy analyze and understand.

We want people to have the sublime experience when they see our prototype. We want them to always have in mind that life isn’t beautiful it’s sublime.

“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there is humor in struggling in ignorance.�

David Lynch

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

WHY DO WE DO WHAT WE DO? The key to failure is trying to please everybody

Author: Natalie Ramild von Vestergaard Specialisation: Sustainable Fashion When I started this course I didn’t really know what critical design really was. Even though there is no clear definition on this, I will try to give you my interpretation of a critical design.

In the course, the chosen theme was a guitar.

This design doesn’t necessarily solve anything, but it should make us think. What can it do for the society and us?

Critical design takes a critical theory based on a design. This is a design that can challenge assumptions and conceptions about the role of objects play in everyday life.

Well, this made me think about what the guitar is all about? When can we call it a guitar? When can we call it music? Is it only a guitar when the musician is playing it?

It also made me think why the guitar looks like it does. Can I change the shape of it, and still call it a guitar? Well that is what the group and I did.

First of all, we wanted to make the guitar very simple. It just needed to make a sound with the strings. We managed to use the laser cutter to make something that didn’t really look like a guitar but had the strings from a guitar, to make a sound.

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We just took out what we believe are the most important parts of the guitar.

So this critical design is all about the musicians in a really difficult and complex music industry.

It’s all about surviving and keeping yourself busy all the time, so people don’t forget you and your songs. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

From one day to another, your song can be the most famous and frequently played song, and yet the next day everybody has forgot all about it and you.

What happened?

This is how my group and I got the idea of a project theme called “One hit wonder”.

A one-hit wonder is any entity that achieves mainstream popularity and success exactly once, and becomes known among the general public solely for that momentary success. Here the musicians’ carrier goes straight to the top and after a short period it all melts away.

After laser cutting and putting together some sort of guitar out of wood, we needed the hollow to make a better sound. We used ice, to make

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Critical Design Prototyping 2017 / Dead Man Humming

the hollow around the strings, so it could get a deeper sound, just like a guitar.

The guitar we made out of wood, was put into a little bucket and then we put a bigger bucket around it. We manage to put water in the inner bucket, and then into the freezer.

We took the ice sculpture to a shopping mall in Valby, Copenhagen, just to see people’s reaction on the critical guitar design. We put up a sign that said, “Try me”. This really made people stop and think, because they had no idea of how to try it, because it didn’t look like the traditional guitar.

In the meantime, the ice was melting. . .

At the end of the day, there was only the little guitar left made out of wood. A little guitar that couldn’t make a real sound, because it lost its hollow, that made the sound perfect. People on the street didn’t care about the little guitar anymore. It was now invisible and forgotten. It could never go back to what is was.

This work is not done, we could have done a lot of other stuff, to dig deeper. If we had all the resources in the world, we would probably speak to an anthropologist or a psychologist, to investigate why people act like they do. Or talk to important people in the music industry.

At the end of the day, this project is not about finding a solution or making something the world needs, but this critical design is for society to stop and think.

Does this project mean that we have answered any of the questions in this essay? No not really, but in the process I learned that critical design is really important for my future designs. It’s not always about finding a solution, but sometimes its about doing the opposite, to make us stop and think. Think of where we are going. Why do we do and think like we do?

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Theoretically speaking the ‘One hit wonder’ project is semilogically, because it’s designed to mean something more than the function.

You could also say that it is juxtaposition, because you put two different elements together and it will make a third meaning.

To end this essay right, I will not claim that this is the solution to anything, but maybe this will make a statement on the music industry? All I know is that I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

(Bill Cosby) Remember to contemplate on why you choose to do what you are doing.

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

-

Bill Cosby

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MUSIC IS FOR ROOKIES Don’t play by the rules

Author: Simon Takatomi Specialisation: Brand Design

Does our guitar have an avocado shape?

How important is it to change something that works?

Is it possible to have critical design prototyping without in some way having customers into consideration? (like target group, value proposition, cost vs. selling price etc.)

How does our guitar solve the issue in mind?

When saying it has to be easy to play, does that also mean it has to sound good?

To answer the avocado shape question we need a questionnaire or interviews with people. This way we could get statistical data that would either support or disapprove our guitar having the shape of an avocado.

However, what we chose to do…

We started out with having a lack of understanding in how to grasp the concept of critical design prototyping. We started out using the tools that we already knew about. The day where we were playing around in the maker lab we started figuring out which machines we would like to use.

The laser cutter became the core of expressing our design. We didn’t have the issue ready before designing and we didn’t have any critical design approach in mind. What we did have 58

was an idea of how we wanted to make a simple guitar as a backpack (but on the chest). We then created a shape and saw it as an avocado (don’t ask why we didn’t see it as an egg). We then started to laser cut the two sides and glued some cardboard to the side. There we had it. It was already in the shape of a guitar. We then thought of the issue being that the skills needed to just play something nice on a guitar takes a lot of practise. We simply said that we wanted to create one that didn’t need the same skillset.

And we used the term biomorphism as an argument for our shape.

Afterwards we added a lot of design and smaller details to emphasize the theory. Plus making it look a lot more like a real product. We ended up being very pleased with our product and thought of it as a great start to using the maker lab. For the sound, we have the acoustics from the guitar case and we wrapped elastic bands around that is adjustable on the back. This way they sound different from each other. And at the same time the user doesn’t need to be concerned about tuning it.

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Well, is the guitar easy to play?

It’s quite easy to make it have sounds. But most guitars are easy to strum and make a sound.

But if we were to play a song around a bonfire, then the avocado guitar would be crap. It would be better to give it to a child and let them play with it.

Does the guitar remind people of an avocado?

Probably only because of the graphics engraved into the design. The shapes of the plate put on top layer reminds me and several others of an Easter egg. Eggs are a bit more common than avocados so I think people think of eggs before avocados when looking at our guitar. If actually they think of any of those two.

Do you need skills to play the guitar?

We probably need to define “play”. As stated in question 1 it’s easy to make a sound but crap when needed to play a song.

What we did was using biomorphism to define the shape of the guitar, by relating it to an avocado. We also used the avocado in our name and as engraving in the guitar.

We used dematerialisation to remove all unnecessary components. What is left is the components needed to make sound. This was an argument towards making it easy to play without needing a certain skillset.

There’s also semiotics included in our final product. What I see as most clear semiotics are the strings/elastic bands and the hole in the centre of the box. These semiotics state that this is a guitar, even though it doesn’t have the handle.

To start small, it could be cool to put on real strings.

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Next we would use some nice and expensive wood as the casing. Afterwards paint it green and give it texture as an avocado. Maybe make the back of the guitar as a round shape. Again, to emphasize the biomorphism. Make a new strap and get a crazy nice band to play a song with the guitar, so it would become the iconic guitar for that single number.

“If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.”

Paul Arden

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PLAYING A GUITAR HAS NEVER BEEN SO EASY! An instrument that plays itself

Author: Vladimir Garabas Specialisation: Brand Design Musical instruments have been around for thousands of years and haven’t changed much over the years. Playing an instrument has always been something that would entertain people and provide pleasant experience for the listeners. At the same time playing a musical instrument (in our case guitar) is considered to be very difficult to learn. Great amount of time, practice and also talent has to be involved in order to master the instrument. That is why it is certainly not easy for everyone to play a guitar. Our avocado guitar’s purpose is to make a guitar that is easy and entertaining to play by anyone, first-timers or old timers.

How can we make playing the guitar easier?

What is the most entertaining about playing the guitar?

What is the most difficult about playing the guitar?

Can lazy or talentless people play guitar?

Why is the aesthetic of nature important?

What is Avocado guitar trying to solve?

What feelings is the guitar supposed to evoke?

Where is the resemblance of the guitar and avocado?

Can this guitar be multi-functional?

For professionals or for ordinary people?

Why does avocado has its natural shape?

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Is playing the guitar comfortable?

Why is avocado considered to be “superfood”?

Where is the connection to Mexico?

Linear account These are the steps of our creation process: 1. We brainstormed about the possibilities, positives and negatives of guitar playing.

2. We have decided to make a guitar that is easy to play and is without the neck and stock head 3. We decided make it small, compact and naturally shaped as after removing this part of a guitar, it automatically started looking like some sort of fruit or egg.

4. We decided to design in a way so its wearable.

5. We have decided to shape it as avocado due to its aerodynamic, pleasant and natural shape.

6. We have decided to attach straps to it making it wearable as a backpack.

7. We laser cut the main parts of the guitar. Top with the hole for sound, bottom platform.

8. We used thick 200 g paper, that we had to dip in water to make it bendy.

9. We shaped the paper around the platforms joining everything together with wood glue 10. The side (black) parts were overlapping the edges of the guitar so we have filled out the spaces with second layer of laser cut wood. This

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layer has both esthetic and technical function. It is engraved and gives the avocado a new shape and style and also makes the surface area for gluing bigger therefore provides better support for used materials.

11. We used pins to hold components in position and left to dry overnight 12. Then we used sand machine to remove the excess glue and smoothen out the edges to create smooth and airtight space in order to make the guitar have its signature sound.

13. We have designed and laser cut the components to hold the strings at place.

14. We glued these components onto the guitar.

15. We attached the strings.

16. Afterwards we realized that all of the strings have the same sound so we have laser cut another piece out of wood. This piece was attached to the back of the guitar where the individual strings are positions and tightened (some more some less) and therefore create different sound.

17. Here we decided to not use 2 straps (backpack) but 1 strap (necklace) 18. We have cut out a strap out of cow leather and engraved it with a laser cutter. We engraved a traditional Mexican pattern in order to indicate the heritage of avocado. We attached the strap with glue.

19. We added a manually cut out piece of leather on the top in order to cover up the imperfections that occurred during our process Rebuttal I think we were not able to perfect the para-functionality of the object as planned (turning a guitar into avocado wearable backpack) however our creation (neck wearable) turned out to work much better in terms of usability and comfort.

Secondly, we have failed to use the regular guitar strings and only used rubber bands (which make surprisingly good sounds but it is still not to its full potential). I also think that there is lack of reasoning behind the Avocado – Guitar connection in terms of practical use, and the main reason of joining these two objects is only for aesthetic reasons. Last thing I would point 64

out would be the inconsistency of engraving, laser-cutting (fonts, shapes) and the assembly of the instrument in general. We did not have a plan on how to build the guitar from start to finish, but the ideas were emerging during the creation. We had later many good ideas that we would be only able to implement if we would have started over with our building.

Concepts In a sense, what we did, was that we materialized some of the concepts in critical design theory learned, and made them tangible. We dematerialized (1 of 4 critical design approaches) the guitar and stripped it of its very important “head & neck part” in order to make playing extremely easy and intuitive. We also used juxtaposition (1 of 4 critical design approaches) as we have joined to very different objects together to create a new whole full of contrast.

We have used the phenomenon of biomorphism where we heavily inspired ourselves with nature in terms of shape and visual esthetic. We made our product para-functional as it can be worn and played at the same time.

If we would have had all the materials, tools and time available. We would have put more effort into creating smoother more “high quality” look of the product. We would try to make it look as much as avocado with sound as close to guitar sound as possible in order to bring the juxtaposition to perfection. At the same time, we would have worked on the sound and try to use proper strings in order to also make better quality sound. We would also like to find a way to dematerialize the avocado guitar even further, make the playing even easier in order to get our point across even better. We would like to create less infra-ordinary product that simply resembles more the avocado and has a better sound and visual output.

Conclusion To conclude our prototype and the elective module, I would say that I am very pleasantly surprised with the outcome both visually and technologically. The sound and functionality of our design turned out to work much better than expected, along with the visual that we have been able to achieve. I believe that we succeeded in creating a functional design that combines two very different objects.

During this course I have gained extremely valuable experience using the laser-cutter that from now on I will make use of as much as I can. The Material lab workshop is an amazing place and I am glad that it has been introduced to us a way where we could try everything for ourselves and apply learned theories in practice.

“It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.”

Johann Sebastian Bach

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THE AVOCADO GUITAR

Author: Simone Larsen Specialisation: Brand Design Introduction Why should I spend 10 minutes asking questions? Can I get something out of this? What can I get out of it? How is an avocado shaped? Why is it shaped like that? Would the shape of an avocado make a good basis of sound if we tried to hollow it? Why did we focus so much on an avocado? Do I know anybody who doesn’t like avocado? Is an avocado beautiful? Where can I find avocado? Do they come from Mexico? Why do we import so many of them? What is a Mexican?

What do they do? Do they play on guitars? Would their music sound differently if they played on a smaller guitar? Are they known for their beautiful pattern? Can we implement that in our design? Is a normal guitar easy to take on the run? Is it easy to play on? Would it be easier if you could just play on it from upside down? Can we make the guitar look like an avocado even more? Can we add a material similar to the peel of an avocado? Would it look disgusting? Can we give the guitar more than one function?

Linear account 1. We got an introduction to the task that would be essential for the grade we will get by the end of this elective.

2. The task consisted of 3 processes. We needed to be critical adjusted to the guitar instrument 66

and find a way of redesign it for a better use if you can say so.

3. After deciding what’s bad about a guitar we needed to figure out how to solve this problem.

This we did by designing a product that would be easier to play at and easier to take with you on the run.

4. When we decided on the design we kept the new terms we just learned in mind and focused a lot on the biomorphism, we got inspired by the nature.

5. Now we decided how the guitar should look and which functions needed to be improved. We gone to the lasercutter and started cutting out the different pieces, we had a lot of fun with this.

We made sure to make the product personal by adding very small details on each element.

Rebuttal The questions we asked ourselves when we where critical about the guitar was following: How am I holding a guitar?

How can I play on a guitar without spending a lot of time on learn how to?

Does the guitar have to be so big to make a good sound?

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It was a bit hard to ask deep questions about the instrument because none of us are musicians, which is why we asked these. I think we have been very open minded to this task and we have found a way to make it easier to play on the instrument. We haven’t been asking people that would use a guitar about their thoughts so in that way we haven’t gained any knowledge about the target group.

Concepts In a sense what we did, was to materialize some of the concepts in critical design theory: We have used specific litterature to put light on the issue we worked with.

First of all we made our product based on the biomorphism theory because it is inspired by the nature. We all really like avocado and while talking about this fruit we thought it actually had some great elements that could be used for a guitar.

We’ve gone with the theory of confirmation Bias as we asked people what they thought about a guitar being too big. The question was leading and they totally agreed with us.

We really hold on to this piece of information in the further design thinking process, why we here used the Anchor effect.

The final product should be as simple as possible; we wanted to dematerialize by removing all redundant elements.

Conclusion When we first came here, it seems a bit weird.

Honestly it wasn’t what I’ve expected from this elective at all. But at we are at the end of it, I can really see the point of it. I had a lot of fun doing the different tasks even though I’m not musical at all. But that’s not the point of it. I get that now.

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If we had more time I think we would have tried to find a material simulating the peel of an avocado and really make it look like an avocado.

This would bring in more of the Biomorphism theory. This theory might be very clear to us but after asking people they didn’t get the strongest feeling of an avocado even though they really like the guitar. In somehow we could have added an seed inside the guitar also, as an avocado has one. This will probably affect the sound, and make it a bit more different than a regular guitar. Overall I think we made a very nice guitar that is very easy to bring, as it is small and handy. Beside that, it’s pretty easy to play at because you can just have it in front of you.

“A good design solves a problem. A bad design creates many.�

Samadara Ginige

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IS DEATH DEATH?

Author: Nicklas Strauss Specialisation: Communication Design and Media You have surely seen it for yourself. Science fiction movies with people, who have robotic body parts. And perhaps you have even seen Oscar Pistorius, the guy who made it to the Olympics with prosthetic legs. We all know how difficult it is learning how to control something new to our bodies – such as learning how to ride a bike, or play the guitar.

gy sources?

What if we could reuse all the material from dead people?

We started out exploring the essence of “Transhumanism” – humans with robotic limbs – and quickly discovered that making a guitar on a human body, held much more debate than first imagined. It therefore categorized itself as a topic of very critical design. Reflecting on transhumanism, we came across questions such as:

Through our desk research, we discovered many string instruments had been made in a way, where they were extremely difficult to play.

They either required immense flexibility, or more than one person to play.

How many would be willing to get a robotic limb, or a mechanical organ?

What is the cost?

Can parts be reused?

Would it be ethical?

Where does the line go?

What is the religious aspect?

How many would get one for the sake of playing an instrument?

What happens to all the human limbs that are replaced, do we burn them?

What if we could recycle the leftovers into ener70

We started researching what had already been done to create music instruments attached to human bodies, made from human bodies, enhancements of bodies, etc.

They were often created as pieces of art, or as a conversational art piece, and few of them actually projected beautiful sounds, but were more of a topic of debate.

We decided to create a prototype of a transhumanistic string instrument associated with a guitar. We determined to go beyond our “AvailabilityHeuristics” and introduce ourselves to the art of lasercutting.

With the laser-cutter we produced a real-sized hand with holes for string elements to play on.

We added strings, and it looked like something

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that should obviously be the resemblance of a guitar. But this was only a prototype of how it would look if the strings were attached to, or coming from within your body.

We wanted to produce an artifact that was not implemented directly into the body, but a detachable artifact, looking almost like a piece of jewelry. We created it from golden metal strings, golden finger-rings, and a golden bracelet. Both ojects were made to be attached to one hand, where the fingers would determine how stretched the cords are, and what sound they make, when the other hand thrums them.

With these two artifacts as conversational elements, we conducted interviews with different body artists. From these interviews we could conclude that the impact of this product had been far overestimated by us, which from our side was a clear “impact bias.”

What we could do instead, is to produce instruments made of human material – strings from hair, guitar cases from bones, etc. But all of this had already been seen during our research. And would it even be sustainable?

The cost of making this product, and the niche of people who would use it, would not make it a lucrative business, and the idea would probably suffer a heavy tumble, while envisioning a “Premortem.”

So, to not suffer from “Anchor Effect”, we decided to move the focus of our project onto something a bit more controversial – could we use the human body to power a machine?

We are obviously not talking about creating a “Mechanical Turk”. No, we are talking about harvesting already dead human bodies, and using them for fuel. In the same manor where you can sign up as an organ donor today, you could sign up your body for other uses after your death.

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This of course raises the question once again, whether this is ethical, or against religion. And we would have to invent the term “Reverse Transhumanism”, where humans act as part of the cycle of machinery, and not the other way around. However, our design has provoked a series of questions from whomever we have shown our artifact.

Our design and prototypes have created a curiosity, and a “what if” attitude towards musical elements as body parts, but also raised the debate about using human body parts as fuel and elements in sustainable energy and mechanical engineering.

Furthermore, the issue of moral and ethics have been wildly debated by anyone encountering our project, and the opinions are divided. Last but not least, as we also found during our research, people have an idea that an instrument emerging from the body would not sound well, while being played.

So in conclusion, we would like to avoid “Entrepreneurial Delusions” of creating whole new world, where people and machines become one. And instead focus on a sustainable business that would survive a pre-mortem test, and have a future in design and music.

Therefore, if we had all the resources in the world at our disposal, we would be able to have the best engineers working on a solution, where a sort of attachable glove could be used as a string instrument, which produces the best possible sound, without the need for electrical speakers.

It should be programmed to know all songs, and will attempt to help you play, by resembling the sounds that you would probably want to play, while strumming it – making it easier to play, and easier listening to.

“Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity.�

Jenaiha Wood.

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SOUNDS OF AFTERLIFE Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature

Author: Stefania Andreea Vlad Specialisation: Communication Design and Media Critical design is about bringing together concepts that discuss the world from a critical perspective and uses design fiction and speculative design proposals to challenge assumptions and conceptions about the role that objects play in everyday life. The starting point in my approach for this project is the guitar as an artifact placed in a context where the human body becomes the secondary artifact. A guitar is a musical instrument that has as basic elements the strings, which are attached to a body. The materials used to build a guitar are usually wood, metal, iron and plastic. The critical perspective on this object is activated when I introduce the conacept of Transhumanism to combine these two artifacts. Transhumanism is using technology and science to enhance and modify the human body and holds the belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations. Having this first idea in mind and combining these elements and concepts together, I started thinking about a new concept, that encapsulates the critical perspective on our world regarding the way we, as humanity, build and modify our reality and the environment and it brings into discussion the Sustainability aspects of our economic, political and cultural world. I would like to call this new concept: Reversed Transhumanism – when the human body 74

adds to technology, becoming the raw material for the objects we build and energy source for machines and devices that we use and work with. In the research and design process, several questions were raised: 1.

How the human body can become a medium through which music is created?

2.

How technology can be used to modify the human body so it becomes a musical instrument?

3.

How the culture can embrace the idea that technology can actually enhance the human body to do things that is not supposed to do?

4.

How a world build on the idea of “Reversed Transhumanism� could look like?

5.

What is the current perspective on using the human body as raw material or resource to build our objects or fuel our machines?

6.

Would people in the future donate their dead body to be used as raw material to build or fuel the world?

7.

What is the ethical and the religious perspective on using the human body as resource to build our objects (musical instruments)?

8.

How would a human resource storage system look like? How would a production system look like?

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9.

What objects would people build with human materials?

10.

What parts of the body would be the first to be ethically accepted as resources to be used for building objects?

In order to address these questions, several domains and areas need to be consulted and researched. Areas such as science, technology, ethics, religion, cultural beliefs, anthropology, economics and politics, ecology and nature studies are important to be addressed when approaching the subject of Body materiality and Reversed Transhumanism.

However, what we chose to do is to explore various ways how we can create objects that has the potential to bring into awareness and questioning the idea of using the human body as a body for a music instrument and as a resource to build a music instrument. For this, we created an object that looks like a piece of jewelry due to the materials we used and the aesthetics of these materials – golden metals. The piece is made of 5 rings that go on each finger, which are attached to the metal wires, which are attached to a golden bracelet that is placed on the arm. This way, the arm becomes the body of the guitar, and the strings could be adjusted and tensioned by the movement of the arm.

The second prototype we worked on is exploring the concept of Reversed Transhumanism, and we used “human elements” to build the guitar.

The body of the guitar resembles a classic guitar but the add-on is the profile face of a female on the side of the body of the guitar. The strings has been replaced with a hair-extension that reminds the viewer of human presence and the juxtaposition of the two elements – the guitar shape and the human hair – brings the question: what if our objects are made of human materials? The functionality of the guitar as a musical instrument disappears at this stage, and the object receives an infra-ordinary value.

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These prototypes only plays the role of sketches, trying to bring into the viewer’s awareness the idea of the human body as a replacement of the usual materials we use to build the objects around us. The way the world and the reality we live in today is build on a paradigm that lays on the idea that the humans are in the center of this totality, therefore is our right to use the environment, the nature and its elements in our own benefits, and we try to open the debate about the sustainability and its definition.

This project questions this idea and pushes the comfortable boundaries of how we perceive the relationships we have with the environment, with our own bodies, and brings into our minds the question: What if we live in world where the human body becomes raw material, resources and fuel for our objects and machines? How do we create a sustainable world by “giving back to the nature”, giving our bodies back to the nature?

“Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.�

Blaise Pascal

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TEEN-GUILT BAG Suck it!

Author: Malene Gam Specialisation: Entrepreneurship As I’m siting here Saturday evening writing and enjoying a glass of red wine while my kid is sleeping in the next room. I can’t help but think back to the days when I was younger, only responsible for myself and where I could do what I wanted when I wanted.

why I think this problem is important to address, so people in Denmark can get a different view of minors’ drinking patterns. So I’m asking why do the teenagers drink so early? Is it group pressure? Is it to look cool? -“I thought I did.” Or are they afraid of being excluded?

But it was also a time of insecurity, always trying to fit in and strong emotions that couldn’t be explained. Which leads me to the issue we decided to approach, which is under aged drinking and the behavior that comes with.

And then there are all the health issues, because we know that the brains of a 13 year old person, is not yet fully developed and that alcohol attacks the brains directly.

Today the age limit is 16 years for light alcohol and 18 years for strong alcohol. But even though there is an age limit, children at the age of 13 years, start drinking and smoking. I started drinking at 13 years, it was 2 days before my confirmation and I was really drunk. So drunk that I smoked, puked in a fairground carousel and was almost brought to the hospital to get my stomach pumped. But I escaped the paramedics at the last minute. The next day I had to tell my parents about what I had done, and they were very disappointed, but they didn’t do anything about it, so I kept on drinking.

When I look back on the event, I don’t think I was old enough to do the things I did. That is 78

There are many questions surrounding this topic, and we can’t focus on all, but our intention was to make a prototype, that would make the kids and their parents think extra before drinking and acting out in public. Our thought was to make it uncool or even stupid to drink at 13 years.

But this does not answer the questions above.

To get real useful answers we would need to talk to a number of experts. It could be a professor that studies human behavior and maybe someone who studies cultures, more specific the Danish culture. It could also be a children’s psychologist or someone who works with teenagers, and knows their behavior.

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In our prototype making we had to use the guitar as an element in our work, and we choose to make handbag for a teenage girl, that could contain beer and hide it from her parents when she was going out. Because many teenagers that young are not allowed to drink, but do it anyway.

We drew up some thoughts of how our guitar should look, and what it would do. Then we made our guitar parts in illustrator, and went to the lasercutter and made it happen. We now had two guitar parts, that we glued together with a piece of wood in the middle to make it more stable, and to keep the shape of a guitar.

We glued fur to the sides of the guitar case.

Out of fabric the guitar strings was made as shoulder handles and the last string was made of straws, to drink the beer from. At the end of the straw we placed a pacifier, so it would look like a baby is drinking from it.

What I learned from this prototype making, is how to use the machine in the future, when I want to make some prototypes for schoolwork.

Maybe I can take some it with me later on, when I have to apply for a job. I also learned a lot from all the terms for critical design, which is very useful for future work.

Does this mean that we answered the questions, NO! The problem is much more complex, there are many aspects. It’s about being somebody, to fit in and not being excluded from the community. So if the majority drinks and smokes, then Anne-Sofie also wants to drink and smoke, in fear of not being apart of the community. So we need to make something that can change the majorities’ point of view, and not just that one teenager.

We could have done so much more and we would have done it with a different point of view. Where it didn’t just become ironic or fun, because I doubt that our project will make a significant change in their behavior, but I hope 80

it will make them think.

In a sense what we did, was materialize some of the concepts in critical design theory: Infra-Ordinary - because it does not work well or it does not work at all as it should. It’s only for show.

Reminiscence bump - in the video where I’m playing Anne-Sofie, I try in my role to think back how I was, and how insecure I was on the inside, but how much I didn’t wanted anyone to notice, so I reacted over self-secure and loud.

Optimism bias - because we were very optimistic in our work and I don’t think it turned out as functional as we expected. Impact bias - is also in play, because we want it to make an impact on youngster. And we hope it will stop them from drinking and make it look stupid.

But we properly overestimate the length of the impact. And the teens will be drinking again next weekend. As I said before, the impact goes beyond a “music video”.

Packages – because it is a hiding the beer, which is the essence of our problem that is underage drinking.

Adverserial Design – Because it’s a design that raises questions, about a cultural behavior.

Tactical media – We manipulated and did an event, the music video, to make a critique of todays society.

Provocation – We did it to provoke the parents and the teenagers.

It has been an interesting couple of weeks, I have learned a great deal about critical design, and already looking forward to try out some of my own ideas.

“Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in constant search for truth.�

Barbra Streisand

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TEENAGE DIRTBAG Compulsory skål attendance

Author: Alberte Løkken Specialisation: Entrepreneurship In Denmark most of us start drinking at an early age, I started when I was about 13 years old, and so did many of my friends. Do you remember how old you where, when you had your first drink?

Even if you have to be 16 years old to buy alcohol under 16,5% and 18 years old if there is more than 16,5% alcohol in the product, is it very easy for the young teenagers to buy their alcohol.

This is a big social problem. Isn’t the drinking age limit there for a reason? It becomes a social aspect to drink alcohol, and it sets the scene; you will have to drink if you want to be a part of a group, and you will be seen as a “loser” if you deny drinking alcohol. But shouldn’t children at the age of 13 be able to feel like a part of something, without the interference of alcohol?

These questions have been asked for many years, and have still not been answered. So maybe is a possibility to provoke it, to start an open discussion, so we together can try so solve this problem.

Our prototype is made as a provotype, to comment on this problem. We will make a provocation about this problem to the 13 years olds and their parents. To do this we designed a hand82

bag for teenage girls, where she can hide her beer, and drink straight out of the bag, but it is still obvious. This is a symbol of, that the teenagers don’t want their parents to know about their drinking, so they are smuggling it in their handbags. With the straw, which is attached to the bag, she can drink the beer, without taking the beer out of the bag. At the end of the straw, there are attached a pacifier, to symbolize, that the teenagers are still kids, and not old enough to drink alcohol.

Big Hero 3’s Prototyping process: When we have found the issue we wanted to work with; under age drinking, we started to discuss how our prototype should be. We decided that we wanted to make a provotype, as provocation about the under age drinking. We came up with the idea of a handbag, where you can drink a beer straight out of the bag, with help from a straw with a pacifier at the end.

We started to make the base of the handbag, that has the form of a guitar, that we designed in illustrator. We cut it out and made the details on the laser cutter. We adjusted the bottom of the bag with help from the small automatic saw.

We glued it together with wood glue, and had

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the base of the bag tensioned the night over.

When the base was done, we started to decorate the bag. We glued on some fur, and made some straps, so it would simulate guitar strings. The straps are in the color light pink, so it refers to a young teenage girl. We also had made a hole in the bag, in a shape of a beer bottle, so you can see beer. The straw that you drink from is also in the color pink.

In the movie we follow a 13-year-old girl named Anne-Sofie, who is played by Malene. She is going to a party, so we are with her, when she is getting ready at home, putting on make-up and drinking courage to meet her flame Lasse. She stole the beer from her father’s fridge, and she knows the man from the kiosk on the corner, that will sell her cigarettes.

But did our provotype solve the problem of under age drinking?

No, our provotype don’t solve this problem, but we will get some focus on it. We make people talk. Yet, there are still some people who don’t get the idea of a provotype, and read it to literally instead of the meaning behind.

And what could we have done better, if the time and resources where unlimited?

At first the idea was, that the straw should be out of a PVC tube, but it was not possible to get it home in time of the finishing of the product, so we had to use a regular straw instead. This can seem a little bit more unprofessional, than if it was possible to get the PVC tube. If we had more time, we would have been working more on the technical behind the bag, so the function of drinking the beer straight out of the bag, will be working without problems. It could also be designed in wine, drinks and shots versions.

And to make it even more provocative, give it away for free to the local school kids.

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Critical design theory behind The Teenage Dirtbag: Our provotype is a provocation for problem under age drinking, and have a lot semiotic meaning in it, such as the pacifier. We see the reminiscence bumb in the bag, because we remember how we where when we started to drink our self, and our behavior around the alcohol. Our provotype is a design fiction, because it is not designed as a product to be used in real life. It is also an adverserial design, because it set focus on a problem. The Teenage Dirtbag is infra-ordinary, because it does not work as well as it was supposed do.

The provotype is for provocation, so it should not be read seriously, but with a glimse of irony.

Sometimes it is a good idea to read the context of an object, instead of just reading the object itself.

“The strands of DNA are like strings, and it’s as if I am a walking guitar, a musical being whose vibration can be heard as love.”

Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

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Teenage Dirtbag

Author: Katrin Lisa Olafsdottir Specialisation: Entrepreneurship I come from a culture, where young people become grownups a little too fast, after my opinion. When I say that, I mean that our young generation start to drink in a very young age. What is it we do differently from other cultures, that makes our young people start to drink in an age of 13 years old? I started at at the end of my 13th year of age. I never felt a pressure or that I needed to fit in. But I didn’t want to miss out of the parties, and the social events. Is it a must to drink, for us to be social in our society in Denmark?

To get the answers to all my questions, you either go online now a days, or ask a person from that age group. I have a saying, “Google is your best friend”, and that can really be true from time to another. When you are on the go, and you need a question to be answered quickly, you can always “google it”. I sometimes wish I had that opportunity when I was younger, to just have all the answers within 2 minutes, in my pocket. But on the other hand, how can google know why young kids start to drink early? And we also have that tendency to google symptoms when we are ill, which can be a really bad idea, because google can give you the worst answers, that tells you that you are having cancer or even worse.

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I think we need to look at the sociological aspects of our culture. To find the answers we need to find social professional research. How does our community work? How is the environment, and how does it affect our young generation?

We decided to focus on our young generation and their early drinking. But how can that fit along with the assignment of making a prototype that insinuates a guitar? Well, when we discussed what we thought about what a guitar symbolises, and we agreed on the fact that it can be a social thing, to play the guitar. Often people gather around in a group around a fireplace, and play the guitar and socialize. Our problem is a social problem as well, and that’s where we could combine the guitar and the early drinking in a prototype. Our prototype is a provocation of that problem - early drinking. It’s also a design fiction, because our prototype is not a product, that can be sold in stores. Or maybe it could, but it is a “weird” product that doesn’t make any sense for the “normal consumer”. We created a “teenage bag”. We made the skeleton in the laser cut machine. The skeleton’s semiology is a guitar. It has a hole in the middle, that is shaped as a beer bottle. On the top of the beer bottle there is a tiny hole, where we put in a long pink

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straw. In the end of that straw there is a pacifier wherefrom you can drink beer directly from the bag. Around the corners of the bag, we put a brown fur to complete the look of the bag, and make it sinuate a functional bag. The bag strap contains the missing 5 “strings” of the guitar.

The 6th is the straw.

So I learned on this course to always have in mind, that prototyping methods can be very varying. It depends on what you want to communicate out, and whether you want it to be fiction or realistic.

Our prototype is not realistic at all. If people don’t know our chosen social problem, the bag do not make any sense. But when we combine the prototype and the video, you will understand the provocation we are trying to communicate.

When you are 13 years of age, you are not a child anymore, but you are still not a grown up. The pacifier resembles that you are underage, and not ready yet, to be drinking alcohol. We communicate by exaggerating.

Semiological - The insinuation of the guitar

If we had to do something better, than we already did, I would say we should have made a quantitative or qualitative research in our field, with the accurate audience. By analysing our research, and getting some answers, we could have made a video that were more likely to be a situation from “real life”. But instead we used our own knowledge and memory we had from our own teenage life. It is not that long ago, anyway, we believe.

I study Design & Business - Entrepreneurship.

We learn how to work, from the early stage of the idea, to make the idea become a reality.

How to start up our own business, and how to communicate out our idea. In my education, it is important to understand the process of the prototyping, and how to constantly remake it, and make it communicate your exact chosen “problem”. In this course of Critical Design prototyping, I have learned that you also can communicate in a different way, than a realistic one.

By for example using the term from the B list : provocation, our prototyping methods becomes different, from when you are making a prototype of a product you want to be a selling product, a realistic one.

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Terms used in our project:

Design fiction - Not a real looking and functioning bag Packages – The bag has a hidden function. A beer drinking bag for under age kids.

Provocation - Our video and prototype is in deed a provocation of the social problem.

“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.�

Andrew Grove

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SMASHING GUITARS AND OTHER SINS Smash your guitar every day

Author: Sebastian Langer Specialisation: Entrepreneurship Why is it that many rock musicians smash their instruments, and specifically the guitar? Is smashing a guitar a symbol of wealth?

Showmanship? Anger? Or a statement as Pete Townsend says? Do you need to smash a guitar to be a rock star? Are everyone who smash their guitar a rockstar? Are the destruction of instruments a symbol of the modern society and consumerism? Is it art?

“Basically it’s a gesture which happens on the spur of the moment,” Pete Townshend, rock’s most famous guitar smasher, told Rolling Stone in 1968 by way of explanation. “I think, with guitar smashing, just like performance itself, it’s a performance, it’s an act, it’s an instant and it really ​is meaningless.” Pete Townsend from The Who. He claims that it is art and and meaningless. We want to challenge that statement by making a new one. Stop the bandwagon effect that makes us buy expensive guitars to try to be someone you’re not. Be yourself and be the rockstar you were born. We could have talked to a psychologist about how idols through fan culture make you buy their merchandise. We could have talked to a rockstar about the image they have. Instead I 90

wanted to make an artifact that could democratize the privileges of being a rockstar to every man.

There is a term to describe what we are trying to do: Normalcy. “Stop designing for heroes”.

Founded by Tobias Revell, a lecture of Critical and Digital Design at London College of Communication. We wanted to extend the life of guitars, and democratize the guitar smashing.

Every man should be able to smash their guitar without worrying about of buying a new one.

This concept first started as a brainstorm by using the Lotus Blossom, where we opened our minds and let the ideas flow. We did rapid prototypes of guitars in paper and sketches through workshops. We found out that we wanted to challenge the guitar by adding features and morphing it to give it new meaning. That is what moves society forward, changes.

The prototype process behind this artifact the “Axe Guitar” was tricky. We had a large axe and wanted it to be a functional guitar as well. Some components from the guitar are more defining than others and therefore you could say we dematerialized the guitar, so we only had a few components left. Components like: fretboard,

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bridge, strings, pickup, tuning knobs were implemented on our axe.

We made a juxtaposition with the two objects, the guitar and the axe by respectfully merging the two objects together. We used 3D printing for most of the guitar parts, and the wood workshop at Makerlab, KEA for the axe. We made the prototype presentable by using sandpaper for the woodwork.

The 3D printing was time consuming and a hurdle, but we wanted it to work on our product because it represents new technology, and the structure of our axe are from another time of technology. Here we are using the accretive space by combining technologies from different times.

The A/B manifesto highlights some of the essentials differences in affirmative design and critical design. We wanted to make critical design which comments on society. We want to make people think, but also make it satirical.

We are not claiming this prototype is done. We wanted to make a statement about inequality and social status with this artifact. Some adjustments could be made to make our statement more clear. If you could play the strings you would be likely to see it as a real guitar, but the lack of time for this prototype didn’t make it possible for us.

In a sense, what we did manage was to materialise some of the concepts in critical design theory: we made a juxtaposition, we made it satirical and made us think from the A/B Manifest, we used normalcy term because we wanted to make an artifact that could make us all a rockstar. “Get You a Man Who Can Do Both” is a Twitter copypasta which often accompanies photographs and illustrations of celebrities and fictional characters appearing classy or formally dressed juxtaposed next to a pictures in which they are wearing casual attire.

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This versatile combination makes the perfect man according to this meme. When Anthony Dunne speaks about juxtaposition it is the combination of two objects.

Why only buy an axe, when you can get a guitar with it? Stop caring for others opinion and their way of living. Be the rockstar you were born.

Play your solo and smash away.

“Get you a guitar who can do both.”

- Sebastian Langer

“When I smash a guitar I want to make a certain statement.�

Pete Townsend

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JAMMING ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS Everybody wants to be a rockstar

Author: Kristian Gadegaard Specialisation: Entrepreneurship Idols. What makes idols and why do we worship them? In the music culture and especially the rock culture idols have been a big part since the beginning. We saw the first signs of this in the 50s where hordes of screaming girl and fans where flocking to concerts with Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Since then many more have emerged and every generation, and subculture have their big music idols. We dress like our idols and want to live their life. They represent the perfect life. But how can we feel like our idols in our daily life ?

We wanted to start out by looking at the artifacts of the rock star, especially the guitar. The guitar has always been a big part of the rock culture.

But what defines a guitar? What is so special about guitars?

We noticed that guitars often look like other stuff, especially axes, and often guitars were used as weapons to smash stuff at concerts.

What is the connection between rock and axes?

Is it the shape, the feeling, or is it a battle thing?

So do rock stars feel like warriors? Does that mean people who worship idols and want to be rock stars, really wants to be warriors?

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We wanted to take a closer look at this.

There are many ways we could answer these questions. We could look a patent drawings and history of the first versions of a guitar. Because that must be the real definition of a guitar. Or maybe not, because guitars have changed like everything else. So we could look at that change in the design. What made the need for the change? We could look at new inventions through history which effected the design. New materials, electricity. We could also look at culture, music genres and fashion.

Did the biggest rock stars affect the design of future guitars? If so how? Is it the band wagon effect, where people buy the guitar because they see their idol with it or do they want to feel like them?. To understand these feelings of the fans and the rock stars, we could interview them to better understand. And to see if we can affect these changes and feeling with a new design, we would need to test the new design with the users.

So we wanted to make an artifact, that could make you feel like a rock star in your ordinary life.

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So we wanted to make a axe. Which also should be a functioning guitar. We used juxtaposition to merge two forms to make a third version. a real axe that gives you the same feeling as a guitar.

We found a cleaver axe. Sandpapered it down.

Made the shaft look like a fret board and 3d printed guitar parts and glued them on. Then we put the real guitar strings on the 3D printed pick-up, which we connected to three drilled holes in the bottom of the shaft. Then we could tighten up our strings. Now we had a real axe which you could just turn around and get the feeling of playing a sweet guitar rif.

So we wanted people to get the feeling, of transforming to become a rock star. So we filmed sebastian in the woods where he finds a magical axe that turns him into a rockstar when ever he is chopping wood.

To the movie and the product we used normalcy from the critical design theory, because we wanted the make the normal person feel like the idol they worship. We also made it satirical so this transformation I even more clear.

Does this mean we have answered any of the questions? We can conclude that there if no real definition of a guitar. if it makes you feel like a rock star. Doesn’t that make it a guitar?

We don’t know that yet, but that’s our hypothesis. To conclude this we would need to do some testing with users. with the tests we would get some feedback, and then be able to start answering some questions. But still when we talk feelings there are no real answers, and we do not use any psychology theories or sources.

If we had all the resources in the world, the axe should be a real functional guitar. Which could connect to Bluetooth devices so when you play the guitar the sound would come out of your speaker or phone. We would also hand carve our own shaft so it would be more prestigeful to buy these axes, which would enhance the exclu96

sivity and the rock star feeling when you stand in the woods or backyard and chopping wood while you are jamming along to your favorite tunes.

So the next time you are out in the woods chopping trees down, bring your Guitar Axe and put on a rock show for the birds and bears.

“You don’t really get to choose. We worship you, and that makes you our God.” Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker

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NAKED GUITARS Standards are like toothbrushes

Author: Marie Brandt Pedersen Specialisation: Brand Design Everybody has their way of expressing themselves. With different visual styles and through materialism we try to put on a mask to show a specific version of ourselves. It is difficult for us to basically be who we were born to be. To be the cleanest version of ourselves and to be happy and proud about it. Because that means that we are “naked” as human beings - that we are honest with who we really are - and that is something that we have a lot of difficulties with.

Therefore we wear all these things and stuff to try and communicate who we want to be or who we want others to think we are or who we think we are. Why are we doing this? Why do we attach so strongly to material stuff and why does that make us comfortable? Does it actually work?

We have been working with the issue of ideal images. The fact that we do not dare to be ourselves. We created a guitar book called “How to play a woman guitar”.

Our proces started out with a brainstorm on the concept of a guitar. We did that to start a discussion and to start our idea generation. When we found out that what we wanted to work with was the ideal image issue, we talked about how to make a critical concept of that. We wanted to really underline our message, and therefore we 98

wanted to make a coffee table book, with images of men playing guitar, so that people would be exposed to the message several times.

We did sketches of the book and how it could look like a guitar. Then we made a paper model of the book, to get the proportions right. We made a small prototype with wood (the cover) on the laser cutter and with normal A4 paper for the pages. We did that to learn how we could glue the pages together to get the feel of a real book. We made the final prototype in the proportions of a A3-paper and engraved it with the title “How to play a woman guitar”.

Then we printed the inside with pictures of guys with guitars (found on Pinterest and so on) on A1 poster paper. On the pages we put some extra ‘flaps’ to use for glueing the pages together in the book. Then we cut the pages in the laser cutter as well, with the same form as the book, and then glued the pages together one by one with wooden glue. Then put it together with the wooden cover.

Our project is not a scientific or psychological project / prototype of any art. We are not answering any questions, we are not solving or trying to sell anything. We are making a com-

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ment on a human / social subject that we have observed in society and in our own lives and that we find interesting. We are doing it to be provocative, to ask questions (not to answer them) and to make people think. That is critical design.

In a sense, what we did was materializing some of the concepts in critical design theory. We created a satirical guitar book to point out some issues in society, and we used the design as a medium - we created a semiotic skin (Dunne) to communicate the issue.

The semiotic skin is the cover of the book with the title “How to play a woman guitar”. We did it to provoke and to start a debate, which is elements from the B-manifest.

If we were to continue the work in the light of critical design and we had all the ressources in the world at our disposal, we could use a real bindery to create a more tablea book-looking book (thicker and with more pages) to get the point better across. We could find some models that would fit our project, and make a photoshoot. And we could make an exhibition with other critical design prototypes on this issue. We could create our own bias called ‘Musician-effect - the tendency for people to appear more attractive with a guitar than without one’.

Because of the critical aspect of our project, we didn’t try to answer any questions. If we were to continue the work in the light of something else than critical design we could ask different experts to answer our questions. We could talk to psychologists, sociologists and lifestyle experts to get a view on why we have these ideal images, what we use them for and why it actually works.

We could set up an experiment with guitars and people, and observe, how girls react on guys with guitars versus guys without guitars.

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“Standards are like toothbrushes everybody agrees you should have one, but no one wants to use yours.�

Joe Croser

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NOWADAYS HE ONLY PLAYS HER How to play a woman

Author: Tuva Victoria Belfrage Nesse Specialisation: Communication Design and Media Why are men using objects to be a better version of them selves? This project is about guys using guitars to get to women. Here is a question for women, why are you falling for guitar players?

As soon as an attractive guy gets a guitar in his hand, he becomes even more attractive. If we look at all the superstars out there, holding their instruments surrounded by women, and there is a lonely guy watching them at home on YouTube thinking: “Hey, I might just get a guitar, maybe then they will notice me”. Are men hiding behind objects to look cooler? And honey, why are you carrying a guitar around, when you don’t even know how to play it?

There are many ways we could answer these question. We could ask people if they agreed to our issue, or do anonym surveys to get a number of how many people are actually using their guitar to get to women, or how many women fall for guitar players. There are a lot of articles on the internet “proving” that our issue is right, we could have read them all and tried to understand why.

However, what we chose to do was to start out with the word “guitar”. We wrote down all the words we associated with a guitar that crossed our mind, and this is how we came up with our 102

issue. Guys, object, sex and woman was our words. Our issue was this perfect guy hiding behind his guitar to get to women. People are using different objects to live up to ideal pictures and trying to be something their not.

We made a book about this issue, where the book cover says: “How to play a woman guitar”.

The inside of the book is full of pictures of hot guys playing the guitar, which is to symbolize the ideal pictures men try to live up to.

The form of the book is a guitar/woman body. We cut the wood cover and engraved the title with the laser cutter, we also cut the pages in the laser cutter to get the exact same form. Then we glued the pages in the book, one by one.

To prove our point even more, we made this film called “The player”. We made up a character, a lonely guy using the guitar to get to woman.

This book where supposed to make a statement for both guys and women. This was a provocation for men using objects to be a “better” version of themselves and to the women falling for it.

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I’m not claiming that we answered all our questions with this prototype, but critical design is more about asking questions than answering them. This is not a science project, and I’m sure we could make the prototype even better with more time. This was more about making a social comment on our issue.

In a sense what we did, was to materialize some of the concepts in critical design theory. We started out with the B-manifesto, there were a lot of terms that confirmed our prototype as critical design, but our main focus was provocation and a satire. We also focused on semiotic skins, the look of the book and how it is presented for the person/receiver.

Our issue is also a Band Wagon effect, the tendency to do things because many other people do the same, ideal pictures.

This was only a three-week experience, but if we had all the resources at our disposal we would make the book even bigger with more pictures and also include text to get the point better across. We are happy about the results of the prototype, and we felt like we made a social comment on this subject with a lot of theories from critical design.

There are all kinds of answers for what critical design really is, but one thing is for sure, as a designer you should read critical theory.

It makes you think outside the box during your projects and it cast a new light to subjects and gives your results originality.

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“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.�

Judy Garland

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ARE YOU A PLAYER?

Author: Ira Sofia Charbis Kjær-Rasmussen Specialisation: Fashion Management Have you ever tried to pretend to be someone or something you are not just to get attention of the other sex? To make an impression? To get accepted? To fit in? To be “normal”? Or special?

To live up to an ideal image?.. Maybe you don’t know or don’t remember.. Maybe you were not aware of it..

You might also have experienced to be fascinated of another person’s attempt to make an impression on you or others? Maybe without realizing it...

You are probably not the only one.

There have always existed ideal images on how a perfect man or woman should be or look like.

This project deals with the ideal image of a man playing the guitar. How men are using the guitar to get girls. How men are using it to create a certain kind of appearance. How women are attracted to it.

It can be very complex to understand the human mind and behavior. Throughout working with this course we had to gain a lot of knowledge from a more sociological and psychological point of view to achieve competences within Critical Design.

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There are many ways to deal with the above issue. Through qualitative methods like interviews, which is used in for instance Psychology and Sociology, you can develop an understanding of people’s behavior; do women tend to like guys who play guitar? And why? With the use of another sociological method, observation, it is possible to observe people’s behavior and how the receivers react on this behavior.

However, our purpose is not to answer a question or find a solution to a problem or an issue since we are working within critical design. The aim here is to comment, show and create attention on an issue or a specific behavior. The purpose is to make people aware of this specific behavior and reflect on it, instead of understanding why and when people do as they do.

What we chose to do was expressing the issue through a critical design, with the intention of making the receiver think and reflect. We brainstormed about the guitar, where the guitar was centered for discussions and reflected on our associations with the guitar. We considered the meanings and symbols of a guitar and found this issue interesting; the guitar has become an object to pick up girls with. We discussed how we should express this through a design as a

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medium. How should it look? To emphasize something, you can either exaggerate a point or you can show or compare it with the opposite to make a clear contrast. That’s why we came up with the idea about a book which can be associated with knowledge, wisdom, learning, educating. The book is titled like a guide: “How to Play a Woman Guitar” and makes the receiver expect some kind of guidance and advice. Instead the book is filled with images of have naked men holding a guitar – not even playing on it.

So, does this mean our design answers all the above question? No of course not. Our design is just one way to address the issue. Do we know if people understand the point? How they receive it? Their reactions? No but we assume that since there are no explanations or descriptions, the receiver must start thinking about the meaning of this book.

In a sense, what we did was to materialize and visualize some of the concepts in critical design theory. At first we were inspired of the theory of the Band wagon effect (Elster), which describes how people are doing or saying things because many other people do so – the need to fit in, to be “normal”. In relation to this we also found it interesting to discuss the term normative and how a normative behavior can come from expectations, and how ideal images can have great influence on how we think, behave and perceive things.

In the design process we made great use of Dunne & Raby’s B-Manifesto (Dunne & Raby 2009). Our book communicates a provocative and problem finding message using design as a medium, for which the receiver is not a buyer or a consumer, but a person, a citizen. The purpose of the book is to make us think, reflect and debate. The message is expressed visually and rhetorically, by using a lot of pictures and a few words. The choice of the word “play”, appeals to the receivers connotative and denotative level of understanding, as it refers to both playing a 108

guitar and playing a woman.

Its use of satire emphasizes the point of the design. We also chose to emphasize and exaggerate the stereotypic way of thinking, to really make our point clear, and appeal to the part of the human mind called System 1 (Kahnemann 2013), which thinks in a fast, automatic, subconscious and stereotypic way.

If we had all the resources at our disposal we could have made more out of the semiotic skin (Dunne 2005) of the final design. We could have cut the cover of the book of a real guitar and then painted it with lacquer to symbolize a glossy and shiny surface, to get the point better across. We would also have liked to make it excessively large, by adding more pages to emphasize the satire and exaggeration.

So, are you a player? Or are you being yourself?

“My one regret in life, is that I am not someone else.�

Woody Allen

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BEHIND THE SCENES ...or how critical designers roll

The first prototypes

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If we fails as designers we can always become carpenters

Operating the Laser Cutter

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Ocarina’s negative form made out of plaster

Moulds in the oven

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Ocarinas ready to play... or not?

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Yes, we master molecular chemistry as well

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REFERENCES DiSalvo, C. (2012). Adverserial Design. MIT Press.

Dunne, A. (2008). Hertzian Tales. MIT Press.

Elster, J. (2007). Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking Fast and Slow. Penguin.

Revell, T. (2013). Critical Design / Design Fiction lecture finally written up. (loooooong). Retrieved January 23, 2017, from http://blog.tobiasrevell.com/2013/12/critical-design-design-fiction-lecture.html

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OH CROP! We’ve made it!

DEAD MAN HUMMING Critical Design Prototyping 2017 An infraordinary journey of an extraordinary musical instrument Design, Layout & Editing by Lukas Cibula Photography by Louise Thelander & Simon Takatomi Proofreading by Maria Pedersen, Tuva Nesse & Katrin Olafdottir Awesome critical thinking by KEA Students