The "Technical Artifact":

Toolkit for Examining Our Relationship with Data via Designed Objects

Problem

Oftentimes, people don't appreciate the objects that surround them. They don't understand the information contained within them; they don't understand the depth of the relationship that those objects have with humanity; nor do they understand that this relationship, when leveraged properly, can drive the growth of our society and the evolution of our species. This toolkit is my attempt to guide my audience to perceive objects in such a way that they can access the information these objects encode about people in a simple and straightforward manner.

Final Model

Target User

This project was made for those people who do not know anything about the objects in their lives aside from what functions they've been told the objects posses. It's for those who accept the world and its objects as they are, with no thought to what they could be.

Research & Conceptual Development

I. What is the relationship between people and objects?

Defining the nature of, and relationship between, the information contained in artifacts

I determined that there were 4 general categories of information that are stored in technical artifacts:

1) Human Cognitive Development - information about the collective state of development/evolution of the species at the time of the artifact's creation; the problem or challenge humans were tackling; and the depth of the exploration of what it means to be human at that time.

parallel to many forms of comm - artif as comm.tif

2) Sociocultural Significance - refers to the information encoded in the object about the culture, society, and time period of the creator and the challenge they were addressing. This includes details such as political climate, local culture, the aesthetic and functional preferences of the time, the challenge’s placement on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and in-group / out-group roles and dynamics.

3) Product Evolution - the versions of the object itself as it transforms from a problem/challenge, to an idea, to a reality. It mimics the design process, and shows how a simple, unrefined idea as a result of a conflict between a human and its environment can evolve to be a technical artifact – the conceptual evolution of its form and function.

4) Manufacturing - fabrication part of object creation. Includes decisions about material choices, fabrication techniques, and systems of thinking about design that influence the resulting object.

Stages of Manufacturing - Conceptual

Design & Fabrication

Mood board - Visual & Contextual Inspiration

Prototype I:

I designed a tool & accompanying exercise to help people explore the information hidden in objects.

Material - Cardboard, painted black to disappear & let the questions shine

Fabrication - Hot glue and scissors

The idea was for the user to take an object in their surrounds, and follow a series of questions to help them discover the information contained inside. In the innermost layer, I included a broken mirror, to symbolize the layers of information contained in the object of which the user is now aware.