This collaborative project was an opportunity to work alongside Mallorca-based footwear company CAMPER. The outline of the project required two small exercises leading to the final road movie design.
My design team found that during the COVID-19 pandemic in London, high stress levels and poor mental health became increasingly prevalent. This project investigated the use of an interactive experience to expand the accessibility of stress relieving environments such as the beach to city dwellers.
The initial stages of the collaborative project involved designing conversational vehicles and then recording actions and reactions in real space, followed by generating conversations through designed interventions. The main research project focused on the concepts of memory and daydreaming, originating from the small exercises to develop a road map into the speculative.
This entry will mirror the design process in the format of a story-like blog post.
Design Team: Benjamin Jeffries, Aaron Yuxuan Zhao and Sara Khorsandi
Goldsmiths Advisors: Roberto Feo and Annelore Schneider
CAMPER Advisors: Gloria Rodriguez (Art Director), Adriana Rodriguez (Head of International Collaborations) and Miguel Fluxa (CEO)
Additional Advisors: Prof. Rosario Hurtado (Artist/Designer - Director of MA Space & Communication, HEAD Geneve)
Research
Questions to ponder.
How to make the experience of the beach more accessible?
How to simulate a beach experience?
Why is the beach a calming presence and why it resides in our fondest memories?
What are the benefits of the beach?
Senses
Sight (Vision)
Hearing (Auditory)
Smell (Olfactory)
Taste (Gustatory)
Touch (Tactile)
Vestibular (Movement)
Relationship between the beach and our senses.
Sight
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The blue shade of water creates relaxing responses in the brain, these responses are feelings of tranquillity and serenity.
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Changes in brain wave frequency put the body in a meditative state.
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Examples of blue and green are used in Dentistry offices and medical facilities for a calming effect.
Smell/Taste
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Beach air contains negative ions which are beneficial as they purify the body of impurities by ridding the air of heavy elements that harm the body.
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Oxygen atoms with an additional electron are produced naturally near crashing or falling water. Example: The ocean, waterfalls, water features and showers.
Hearing
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The repetitive sounds created by crashing waves achieve a meditative state in the brain. These non-threatening slow whooshing sounds calm the stressed brain.
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Sounds of the waves crashing also align with natural brain rhythms and lead to a goodnight's sleep.
Touch/Vestibular
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The texture of the sand between toes creates a calming sensation.
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Walking on the beach benefits specific acupuncture points on the feet in the arch, heel and toe regions.
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The placebo effect, conditioned through popular culture that the beach is relaxing.
Experiment with touch and movement
Simulation of walking on the beach without the use of sand.
Interview with Dr Devin Terhune
Devin’s research concerns a wide range of phenomena within the broad domain of consciousness science with specific interests in the following areas:
Awareness, Dissociation and dissociative disorders, Functional neurological disorders, Hypnosis, Metacognition, Placebo, Psychedelics, Suggestibility, Synaesthesia, Time perception
We conducted a set of three interviews for research: an Iran-based road movies director, a Shanghai businessman who suffers from excessive daydreaming and a psychoanalyst at Goldsmiths, University of London. The interview with Dr Devin Terhune was the most beneficial for the direction of our project. Dr. Terhune's responses offered a scientific perspective on experience simulation and the placebo effect.
Questions discussed
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Has your work within such topics as time perception, psychedelics, awareness and dissociative disorders encountered the topic of daydreaming?
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Is it possible for individuals who experience excessive daydreaming to undergo time loss or dissociate memories from reality?
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Is there a particular situation that sets off daydreaming or makes you daydream more frequently?
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What are the benefits of sensory therapy for memory? Reliving memory through subtle means. Description of choreographed performances with different sensory activities, i.e. pathway with acupuncture points and water feature creating negative ions.
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Are there mental exercises that you have subjects perform during your studies on trauma and memory?
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Discussion of the concept of the placebo. How is the beach a placebo?
What we learned
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Maladaptive daydreaming and mind wandering. Using experimental sampling methods to relate to cognitive control.
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Suppress executive control to encourage daydreaming.
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Facilitate daydreaming through progressive muscular relaxation. Can be achieved through an audio track with the experimenter engaging in counterproductive thinking.
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Boring tasks that facilitate daydreaming, cognitive effort minimises daydreaming.
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Engage in a fairly basic task that doesn't require a lot of cognitive function.
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The study was performed with individuals sitting in a room having to press on a square every 18 milliseconds with a 25% chance of mind-wandering.
Inspired by our interview with Dr Devin Terhune, we constructed our mind-wandering experiment to test whether we could simulate mind-wandering through constructed placebo-like equipment. The finished device provided the participant with a task that required little cognitive attention.
The "press" program was created in the application Processing. The Java code is included below. The sole task for the participant was to press the red button every time the instruction appeared on the screen. The experiment was a placebo as the command would appear on the screen every 2 seconds regardless of the participant's actions. The button also was a mere piece of wood with a plastic bottle cap glued to the top with foam inserted underneath to simulate the feel of a button and was not functional.
The device was the sole focus in the new video in which the participant underwent the task and reported mind-wandering at its conclusion.
Java code:
String oneName = "Press";
String otherName = "";
String displayed ="";
int interval = 2000; // 2s
int time;
PFont font;
void setup() {
size(1000, 1000);
font = createFont("arial", 40);
background(0,191,255);
displayed = oneName;
time = millis();
textFont(font);
fill(255);
}
void draw() {
background(0,191,255);
text(displayed, width/2 - textWidth(displayed)/2, height/2);
if (millis() - time > interval) {
displayed = displayed.equals(oneName)? otherName:oneName;
time = millis();
}
}
Process
Re-enactment of psychoanalytic mind-wandering experiment
Creation of sensory room
Following our placebo experiment, we decided to employ the Hollywood prop-like trickery previously used to stimulate mind-wandering to instead simulate a beach-like sensory experience. We constructed a room with carefully orchestrated sensory activities that would recreate different aspects of the beach experience. The room included a pressure point walk, a prototype smell diffuser and a visual and hearing experience using blue light, a fan and a two-way mirror.
Our first step towards constructing this room was to soundproof and blackout the existing white walls and exterior light. The idea to create a darkroom was to allow the participants to become fully immersed in our design and experience one sense at a time.
Attempts were made to create a uniquely immersive experience within the sight/hearing section of the sensory room.
The combination of a thin two-way mirror material, a fan and different coloured lighting setups generated intriguing light ripples within the room that produced a calm and meditative atmosphere.
The video below exhibits the generated water-like light. The mirror was placed horizontally along the floor with a repurposed emergency blanket below to exaggerate the reflections. The horizontal placement of the material limited the available range for the reflected light to reach.
Rethinking the sensory room
The environment created by the reflective mirror, fan and light in the confined space inspired us to test different layouts of the material, lighting positions, light colours and fan placement and speed.
Testing in a white space
After the experiments in the blacked-out room, we wanted to test the reflective application in a white room. The results showed that the reflected blue light was easier to see on the white walls in contrast to the original black floor and walls.
Reflective Ceiling
Following our experimentation with the orientation of the material and the contrast of the light on different backgrounds, we decided to use the mirrors to mask the ceiling of the black space.
The placement of the material along the ceiling directed the light reflection onto the floor of the space. We then decided to align three pieces of the reflective material to cover the entire ceiling. We suspended the material with alternating wooden beams to create three different undulating lines. The material's placement created a more immersive and complete space.
Final Outcome
Placebo room
Wander, Explore and Discover
Pause, Reflect and Notice
Placebo-room stimulates forgotten experiences, with sparkling and flowing blue space on offer.
It is perfect for getting away from it all in this spectacular part of the world.
To someone starting on a long journey, meaning, take it easy,
Relax, let what’s taking you take you.
Think of landscape incessantly.
The outcome is a result of all of our tests. The space we ended up creating employed the interactive knowledge we collected throughout the course of the project. We covered the floor with light blue paper to better highlight the reflective blue light. We added two blue lights and fans carefully positioned them in the space. The material selected and the sound of the fans were constructed to trick participants to remember seaside memories. The completed installation is a device that simulates memories of the seaside and encourages participants to drift away from reality. The space allowed for multiple participants to engage with the space and relieve stress. After a live test including 50 participants, the overall feedback reported was an immediate sense of calm and feeling of being under the ocean's waves.