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Defining the Device

ScaleThe device must operate at the scale of the body, not the scale of a building. It may be held, worn, carried, mounted, occupied, or temporarily enclose a person. It may use an existing surface or structure for support, but its primary design proposition must remain a discrete instrument rather than an architectural intervention.

Context of Use Identify where, when, and by whom the device is encountered. Situate it within contemporary life through a credible setting, circumstance, practice, or ritual. Its use might be ordinary, occasional, cyclical, or dependent upon particular conditions. What matters is that the encounter has a meaningful reason to occur, rather than existing only as a novelty or spectacle.

Participation, not representation The device should place the body in an active relationship with what it engages, rather than simply presenting information about it. Whenever possible, allow the larger reality - or one of its real manifestations - to influence how the device behaves or is experienced. Screens, sensors, data, and other forms of mediation are permitted, provided they meaningfully shape the encounter rather than simply deliver information about the subject.

Design Operations What does the device DO? What must the device actually do to make the relationship sensible? Consider how it might collect, register, filter, amplify, translate, distort, compare, delay, reveal, or otherwise transform some aspect of the larger reality. These operations should inform the device's form, material, mechanism, and interaction. Every significant design decision should serve the relationship you are trying to establish and the quality of attention you hope to cultivate.

Duration What temporal conditions belong to the phenomenon or relationship? Consider the rhythms and timescales involved. Some encounters may happen in a moment; others may require waiting, repetition, return, or change over days or seasons. Design for the duration the relationship demands.

Protocol of Attention What actions does the participant undertake within those conditions? Every device must establish a deliberate sequence or set of conditions through which the encounter unfolds. What must someone do to initiate, sustain, and complete the encounter? What must they attend to, and how might that attention change through use? The protocol might involve waiting, aligning, adjusting, comparing, repeating, cooperating, or returning. It may be brief or extended, intuitive or ritualized. The important question is how the sequence of actions and conditions cultivates the intended quality of attention.

Avoid:

• Aestheticized nostalgia: borrowing the appearance of historical instruments without the logic or purpose that made them meaningful.

• Grandiosity: promising transcendence, awe, or awakening that the device cannot credibly produce at its scale. Modest and true beats sublime and false.

• Empty symbolism: Using an object or image as a metaphor for a larger reality without establishing a convincing operative relationship with it.

**Resist deciding what your device will look like before investigating what it might do. Let research, material experiments, and tests of interaction inform the development of its form and operation.

© Joshua ClarkeTop