On my first read of the brief I was intruded by the project. I have always been interested in hoe people use and interact with spaces and Products but have done very little to put it to the test myself only ever trusted the words of the experts.
As soon as our group of three was formed we began some research. I first began by looking at signage that is directly put there to disturb and change how we use a space, wet floor cones etc. I immediately realised that there is negative connotations with the idea of signage, my mind automatically went to danger, street signs and road sings. Even a quick google image search for ‘signs’ brought up these types as well as some pictures of Mel Gibson and tin foil hats. These types of signage have an authority and trust to them that as a society we are brought up not to challenge what they have on them. People are more likely to question what someone says than what is written on a sign. They lack fun, yes there is very public examples of fun signage but to the common person walking down the street this isn’t what their mind goes to when they think of signs.
As a group we had a few paths we wanted to go down. Either a way to question the power of a sign and how we can change how people use the building. We also wanted to try something fun, get people involved.
After a reconnaissance of DJCAD we had a few spaces in mind. We noticed that the doors along the main corridor of the Matthew Building the doors consisted of large double doors on one side and a single door on the other side. After a quick observation very, few people would use this single door, even if it was easier. Some people would come down the stairs walk by the small door just to use the big one with no added benefit to it. We found this a very strange and wanted to create a sign that would question this and try and inspire more use of the small door.
The next place that we scouted out were the recessed seats in the Main Corridor of the Matthew Building, considering that it was such a busy area we rarely found it in full use. There is only ever a small handful of people in each one at a time. The area is designed communally with the seats facing each other however during our observation people would sit in their phones not even looking at each other despite being a short distance from each other. We felt that this would be the perfect place to put a ‘Fun’ idea. Our initial idea was to create a ball pit out of the lower part of the recessed seats, then we would interchange signs that either promoted the use of it or signs that try to use reverse psychology and we would analyse how this changed how people used it. I carried out a quick survey by asking people that were sitting in the seats if they would use a ball pit if present. This was almost unanimous they said they would use it but would be a novelty.
We began to plan out the ball pit but it immediately became apparent that the logistics of it wouldn’t work (we couldn’t afford enough balls) we kept the door idea on hold just in case. We came up with a number of ways that we could re-work the idea, this is when we came up with using the area to vote/answer. We wanted to create an idea that would promote conversation, we decide that we could put questions up on the wall and split the seats down the middle – initially we thought about getting people to sit on which side they thought was correct/agreed with. But we decided to incorporate the balls and you use them to vote. This would promote interaction and conversation not just from the people using the seats but also people walking by.
We done fairly open questions – ‘Queen vs Beatles’ & ‘What has a larger surface area? Pluto or Russia’ For the signs themselves we went fairly basic we used a large clear font so that I can be read from a distance and used images to add colour. The idea was to keep it inoffensive so that there wasn’t a bias of either one.
Results
Beatles – 9 Queen – 16
Russia – 13 Pluto – 6
The outcome of the votes and answers doesn’t show hoe people used it, but the numbers show that people did interact with the instillation. However, this is probably still less than half of the amount of people that walked by. It did promote conversation with the people using the space, but they also used it for fun they threw the balls around. It didn’t have the full effect that I thought it would but by would no means call it a failure, it was just used differently. Even people waking by would turn to their friends and start talking about it, some people tried to steal some balls, and even had someone ask me if they could sit there (contradicting the idea).