1. Define the Relationship
What relationship between ourselves and something larger than ourselves might be worth experiencing differently because of it?
Do not look for something that simply symbolizes your contemporary concern. Identify a larger reality that another quality of attention might allow us to encounter differently.
2. Investigate How It Operates
How does it operate? What causes it to change? Where and when does it manifest? What can be measured, observed, compared, collected, or experienced? What remains inaccessible to ordinary perception?
Use research and direct investigation to identify a specific behaviour, property, or relationship that could become the basis for a design operation.
3. Make it Sensible
Your device might engage a physical phenomenon, environmental force, technological system, social dynamic, temporal rhythm, or other condition that extends beyond the individual. What matters is that the relationship can become real through an encounter - not remain only an idea.
What relationship between ourselves and something larger than ourselves might be worth experiencing differently because of it?
Do not look for something that simply symbolizes your contemporary concern. Identify a larger reality that another quality of attention might allow us to encounter differently.
2. Investigate How It Operates
How does it operate? What causes it to change? Where and when does it manifest? What can be measured, observed, compared, collected, or experienced? What remains inaccessible to ordinary perception?
Use research and direct investigation to identify a specific behaviour, property, or relationship that could become the basis for a design operation.
3. Make it Sensible
Your device might engage a physical phenomenon, environmental force, technological system, social dynamic, temporal rhythm, or other condition that extends beyond the individual. What matters is that the relationship can become real through an encounter - not remain only an idea.
Test your choice:
- Larger? Does it exceed the individual in scale, duration, reach, or complexity?
- Real? Is it actually present or operative in the world the device inhabits?
- Sensible? Can some aspect of it become perceptible through the body and the device?
- At stake? Does attending to it meaningfully connect to what you believe is at stake?
- Operative? Can you identify a specific behaviour, property, or process that the device can engage or translate?