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Excerpts from weekly report 12.

We still have branding material left, as well as the fear encyclopedia needing fine tuning. However we see it as a better idea to finish the contents of the report first. From all weekly reports(excluding this tumblr page), we’ve written 103 pages of plain text that we will have to gather into something digestable.

(product photography)

From last weeks excerpts, we’ve landed on presenting sengevesenet as a public initiative. We’re still not sure about the degree it will include norwegian cultural heritage and Asbjørnsen and Moe, but we hope to be able to see its righteous place in our service once we have gotten all the material down in the report.

We’ve segmented a very basic starting point after a timeline in order to gather segments of all the information. As of right now, it will be the following:

Foreword. Screenshot and the kings speech about Sengevesenet. Introduction. Chapter overview. Chapter 1, placebo effect and scotophobia. Comparing the placebo effect with design. How does this relate to imagination, delusion and children.

The most common fear among children. Parents as the object of authority. Agency to a guardian. Chapter 1.2, those who affect.

Katrin Glatz Brubakk. Her scenario, what can be done, and what shouldn’t?

Gunnar Åsen. Specifications within age groups of children, and paying attention to the ethics of confirming delusions.

Mother of three and dentist. Her experience with coping and thoughts on “fooling your child”. Mother of three and childrens book illustrator. Conversing with children as a way to tell stories of their past and to make children and adults relate.

Chapter 1.3, those affected.

Conversation with 9 year old on his fears.

Conversation with an older couple (82, and 80 years)

Plans on visiting a kindergarten, why it didn’t work.

Visiting a 5 year old who is currently afraid of the dark. “Solving” his problems with an externalized solution.

Thoughts and conclusions.

Chapter 1.4, branding and concept.

Name.

Logo.

Identity.

Chapter 1.5, 12 objects for fear of darkness. Why an exhibition? Exhibition preparation. Object 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Exhibition. Conclusions.

Chapter 2, Sengevesenet.

Sengevesenet - parents - children, children - parents - Sengevesenet.

Kongens tale, invitations by letter. Selection, visitation.

User journey Conclusions.

Project conclusions. Sources.

-

We’ve also spent this week taking some photos.

(an example of a photograph)

(another example)

Once we’ve gathered all the containments in our report, we will curate the content so that we can address the values of our project to the readers in a way that fits well. We hope to get this down as quickly as possible so that we can start preparing the material for the service, as well as preparing our presentation. Oh, and we realise that we want our report to primarily be in norwegian, so we won’t be able to plug information directly into our report. However, this gives us the chance to revisit preceding thoughts on the project and possibly contextualize them better.

I think we started off writing in english because placebo and big pharma is a known issue to americans or someting. Although, it’s not like americans aren’t afraid of the dark, so we might just have to make a separate report for them if the interest is there.

HOST HOST, HARK!!

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Excerpts from weekly report 9/10/11.

The exhibition presented us with a number of possible directions to Sengevesenet as a refurbished service. We see that exhibitions are a very specific way of presenting material for discourse. However books, magazines, ads, encounters and digital societies might prove just as fit. We have expanded a bit on the overall communicative potential of the service to find the proposal best fit for what we value about Sengevesenet. Note that this report stretches over the weeks we spent in Thailand.

(rugby shirts gifted by the BKK Chulalongkorn university team no. 85 exclusively to Mats and Hermane)

We’ve discussed a selection of potential directions. One that only concerns the exhibition space. One that concerns the tools that might end up in presenting the material in an exhibition or the like. And one that will be by initiative of the state of Norway, to gather fears into an archive for a new version of Asbjørnsen og Moes fairy tales.

Each version utilizes the process we have already used in our project. One is a singular representation, the other points out the very process we’ve had and translated  it into a platform. The last comments in a somewhat banale way on the general reason to why we have been doing this in the first place.

Streamline the exhibition format 

After testing the exhibition once. We realised that it might not have been the idea of an exhibition that gave little inspiration, but how the exhibition is set up in the first place. The exhibition room is an excellent starting point to a service in terms of how certain information posts are set up to children as to adults; the separation and intersection of common understanding.

An exhibition is an incredibly charged way of presenting to an audience. Visitors are often prepared for an ambivalent experience, where the exhibition itself contains subjective objects. An exhibition may compliment itself as well as it illustrates a state of society and/or of the people who come to watch.

Placing an everyday object on a pedestal is also taking the mundane part away from the mundane, everyday practices are put on a halt and displaced into another dimension. Yet. speaking about and lifting up the mundane is also a priceless way of practicing sustainable discourse. The nuances of everyday actions should above all be addressed. On the contrary, widening the gap between say, squeaking foot soles on polished laminate and solving the space travel route of going to Mars, will only alienate the sensory grounds that allow us to truly value the state of the now. Conclusively, an exhibition is a service in that can lift up everyday experiences -in this case, fear of the dark, and displace it into another dimension. We can not measure nor guarantee the outcomes of such a service, we can only point out a contemporary habit in an interesting manner and hope to see the public discuss the rights and the wrongs of acting objectively around the imagination of a child; a precaution that adults should have awareness around all the time.

(conversation with Joel Gethin Lewis(sick) in Bangkok(very sick))

Exhibition +

An exhibition can be several exhibitions. How is the information gathered? is it done systematically? Is it driven by a potential production of the ideas gathered? is it archived in another place beside the exhibitions? 

Can the service be the actual gathering of the stories and their solutions and the output be the exhibition? This adds another dimension to simply exhibiting and opens up the potential for a platform for gathering fears, solutions, opinions and discussions. This is way more typical as a service design. It also distances itself from the actual arena of the exhibition for the better of the exhibition formula. it presupposes that an exhibition is an exhibition, that a book is a book and that a product is a product. the importance in this case will be the actual stories more than the representation of them. This also opens up for potential in presenting the outputs of the stories. It may be presented as somewhat more banale. For instance, a typical dental ad presenting a new monster toothpaste. 

(digital fear encyclopedia)

By request of the Norwegian state

In 1837, Peter Asbjørnsen began travelling Norway in search of folk histories, myths and tales. The journey resulted in several publications from 1845 on Norwegian fairy tales, that later influenced widely recognized Norwegian authors and lyricists such as Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

A lot of conditions made it possible for Asbjørnsen og moe to gather up tales in such a manner. The fact that sites were isolated and far apart made stories told by mouth more exclusively kept within individual locations and heritage. The unknowing association and dissociation between norwegian inhabitants were archived into the literary domain in order to give an impression of the picture of the everyday stories, beliefs and delusions of isolated branches of the same gathered nation.

Norway wishes to follow this up sincerely, 200 years after the first. A new collection of folk stories and fairy tales from a people with the technological means to make them feel less isolated in terms of distance, but perhaps not in terms of discourse. 

The task has been set to yet again consolidate the inner life of the norwegian people. This time out of public commission. Modernized means of archiving will be used, Norway as a “design state”, will state the now by not stating it, and rather state the future condition. The future condition is rooted in our contemporary youths, and their potential for shaping norwegian culture onward with the tools and funds we have at our advantage. That is the state of the now. The project is formed in the designer discourse of the norwegian now. It will be a service design proposal, titled Sengevesenet. Sengevesenet will be a collection of creatives, child psychologists, pedagogists and others suited to the task of discussing and solving problems in collaboration with children, specifically fear of darkness. Why fear of darkness? It is recognized as perhaps the most common type of fear in children aged 3 - 10 years. It manifests itself in children as very descriptively detailed creatures, sensations and memories. In Norway, parents are very discrete in confirming delusions if its not evidently and proven to be harmless. For example Santa Claus or the Easter bunny, both deriving from religion and commerce northamerican tradition, as well as being incredibly impersonal. Playing with the delusions coming from fearing the dark is inherently harmless, if done right. This is where Sengevesenet come into play. They exemplify the act of confirming delusions by a number of visits by invitation from the King. These will be the first and exemplary archives of Sengevesenets Redselsoppslag, the digital version of Asbjørnsen and Moes memoirs, open for the public to add their own experiences.

Further, a selection of the delusions, their deciphering and/or manifested solutions will be gathered in a physical copy as well as exhibitions under Sengevesenets domain.

The proposals are both meant to influence citizens of norway to show the state of the now, and gift our children memoirs as an attempt to give norwegians an access point to their creative past.

Wrap

After choosing one of the specified directions, we have two weeks to finalize the contents and the report. We hope to spend the third week on finalizing our presentations.

tvi tvi

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Excerpts from weekly report 8.

Cht Preparing and exhibiting 12 objects for fear of darkness. Attending book binding courses. Consequence-mapping our service vision. Creating a more holistic user-journey.

(exhibition)

After finishing all 12 objects, we exhibited them for approximately 10 parents and 15 children. The items were easily understood by and engaged the children. They interacted with them in correlation to its function.

The 12 objects were:

1.  The encyclopedia: An imaginative search database where parents can create their own creature article and explain their full origin and anatomy to their children.

2. Sleep as a rock. Make the creature you’re afraid of think that you are a rock.

3. The exhibition. If the creature you are afraid of is just bored, why not entertain it by giving it an exhibition from all your drawings?

4. Talk in the dark. A night light with morse communication with another random child with the same light. 5. Shrink bedsheet. A bedsheet that shrinks you and teleports you to a smaller version of your bed that you can put anywhere you like.

6. Food bowl. To feed the creature.

7. Stilt shoes. Lifts you above the height of your bed when youre walking in your room at night.

8. Cord pillow. Huggable pillow for the child and a waist belt for the parent connected by a cord, so that the child can indirecly hold around their parents.

9. Child clone. A second you that misleads the creature.

10. Post portal. Mailbox for communicating and getting to know your fear.

11. Breath toothpaste. Gives you breath that fills the room with air that repulses your fear. 12. Window mirror. Make the thing watching through your window see themselves instead.

Heres what we encountered:

Parents and children are hard to communicate with in the same vocabulary. During our presentation we noticed that adapting to both making the parents and the children to understad the value of the concept didn’t par up with how we presented.

We believe there are a number of reasons for this.

The space we exhibited in was very detached from the arena that they’re meant to be used in, this made it hard for the parents to see the contextual use of the objects, as well children treating them more as toys.

The parents expected us to take control over communicating the products to the children -as opposed to us encouraging parents to communicate it to their children in their own vocabulary. This might be caused by how parents may have seen our exhibition as an attraction to their children for their own detachment, comparable with taking them to a playground or the cinema.

Conclusively, an exhibition can be a proposal to communicate the values of our service. Although we see how it should focus more on making the parents understand the underlying values of it more than what it did in our first exhibition.

Tips, tricks and temporary solutions.

We’ve concluded that one of the main challenges for us to tackle here in order to make our service work, will be to prove how it surpasses “short-cuts”.  The main short-cuts we se as competitors to Sengevesenet, are turning the lights on at night, and parents and children sharing beds.

(during daytime, children and parents have more time and energy to confront fear of darkness, but at that point it’s no longer an immediate problem).

Our service can compete with these actions in two ways.  One is to make parents see the full potential of confirming fears of darkness, which has been our initial thought during our process.

The other is to make our service an even easier shortcut than turning the lights on or sleeping beside your child.

There could be potential in going both ways under the same service, as solutions that are thought through well can both serve as momentary and permanent solutions to fear. 

(news pages, common sources of parenting tips)

Nevertheless, our most important value to follow here is that we don’t want our service to take responsility on behalf of parents for confirming fantasies. Paying and implementing something makes the user itself unable to see the insights that lie beneath solving the issue themselves and how it is a more sustainable solution as it will grasp the issue as opposed to not speaking about it.

Our service will be alligned with tips on how to raise your child by nurturing their fantasy. It will mound out in a book read by parents and children, with “meta-information” behind every chapter to not just give an external element to personal fear, but also give insight to how these examples play out and what they are good for. 

The purpose here is to critique news sources that has historically affected parents on behalf of fear mongering cases such as how video games can make your child a killer, or even the legislation aganst skateboarding in Norway. These are all headlines that actively tempt parents to take action on behalf of information that stems from single case scenarios.

(google search for fear of darkness)

After our trip to Thailand. We’ll look closer at what ways of pure communication we can use to best fit our users. We also have to begin writing the book. We will seek help from a child psychologist in order to get insight on how to communicate well to parents and children.

adieu

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Excerpts from weekly report 7.

Our exhibition date has been set to the 20th of october. Following reflections, scripting, preparing, arranging, and then branding it all.

(graspable concept)

Statements/questions on exhibiting placebo products for fear of darkness.

Define the brand of the exhibition or the initiative before the user has entered the space.

Define how the room will communicate the products.

Define the products in the exhibition and their individual purpose

These factors should communicate what the participant can do afterwards and/or until the next exhibition or part of the service.

(Sengevesenet - Bed service/bed creature)

Concept Philosophy:

Sengevesenet is defined as an initiative service that seeks to explore how children and guardians may talk or act around fear of darkness.  As with a psychologist seen as a service, conversation is always based on personal triggers. We would never know what certain triggers are on behalf of all of those who are afraid of the dark. Design usually offers manifestations of needs. Although external conversational services - like psychologists, may work well as a conversational service, they are usually initiated on what is seen as uncommon and serious occasions. On “common” problems, like fear of the dark, parents are fully capable of dealing with the situation by talking to their child. 

So, what is really needed is a service that can act as a catalyst for parents to talk about sensational and emotional triggers with their children. This will be done by creating something together, based on the manifestations of their emotion, to suit the comfort of them both. 

Thus, conclusively, the dissemination of those real and valuable instances of (de)mystifying delusions will be in the hands of Sengevesenet. They will spread this to the masses in order to further strengthen awareness and experience of speaking about emotions with our younger self. 

This can be done through videos, graphics, ads, exhibitions, litterature, talks, seminars, games, products and subordinate services to name a few. 

(pallette/safe play)

Brand philosophy:

Name:

Sengevesenet has a double meaning. Vesenet as in creature, and Vesenet as associated with “service” as in the health care service (Helsevesenet). Thus, Sengevesenet is an authoritative “force” denoted by act around the myriad of situations unfolding in the bedroom of a child. Sengevesenet is also the actual thing -the creature as a product of imagination.

Sengevesenet is both a safe and organized thing, but at the same time, a representation of the actual thing it seeks to contain. Logo:

The logo is a visualisation of the name. It is a bed seen from above, with four legs, a pillow and a blanket. The perpective makes the bed look like a creature seen from the front. 

The tight and thick strokes of the logo is meant to make it look more emblematic, to strengthen its expression as an organized unit. The use of cursive is related to the cursive picture notes often used in children’s text books. A drawing or picture might need explaining, just as parent or child might need explainations of their emotions or sensations.   The use of paranthesis is also a nod to parts of the concept philosophy, as it is usually used with cursive under a symbol in translation, often of asian letters and symbols. Since the logo could draw some similarities to an actual asian letter, the logo plays with the literal cultural look of a translation. Our service will serve as a translator between parent and child, therefore giving the logo another dimension including the more obvious reasons stated above. This is not necesserily easy to catch, and we are motivated to keep it that way. 

(moodboard)

Visual Identity:

Sengevesenet communicates on behalf and within the borderland of adult conversations and child conversations. Visually, this can be expressed by exposing how children see “adult things” and how adults see “child things”. Mixing them, interpreting and translating them gives a visually interesting contrast between the mundane as an underlying justification to the playful.

A good reference are the products of the members of the Memphis Group. These were relaitvely normal everyday products, like a leaning chair, a lamp or a toaster, designed to look visually extreme. A stark contrast between expression and intention, giving the object personality and character though still maintaining their respective function.

This is empasized in the typography of Sengevesenet. Beneath the bubbly visual representations of ideas, follows a calm and controlled comment, interpretation or reiteration.

(Sengevesenet typography)

(context... maybe)

Other insights gathered during week 7:

Mats talked to his grandparents about our theme, trying to get a bigger grasp of the timeline of the subject we have been diving into.

With the rise of home electronics, our perception of childhood have shifted into something a far cry from what were typical just 20 years ago, when we were about the same age as our youngest user group. Contrasting even further, both the grandparents were that age during WW2, but under drastically different circumstances. 

The Grandfather (b. 1937) lived in Kristiansand during the War, a city which suffered greater civilian loss than any norwegian city during 9th of April 1940 (The day of the Nazi occupancy). The city was bombed several times, which resulted in several cases of evacuation, many times during night hours.

On the contrary, the Grandmother (b.1940) lived on a remote island outside Brønnøysund called Vega. Almost completely seperated from both cultural impressions and wartimes, she had an uncommonly isolated childhood. 

(war)

I suspected their most notable experiences around fear to be logical to their surrounding sociatal situations, and after presenting the frames around the project, asked them about their memories from the age of my interest. 

Reasonably, many of the things the Grandfather presented, were memories during and relating to the war. One of his earliest memories were being carried by his aunt, terrified of the loud german planes above. He also remembered being evacuated with his family during one night when a dud (bomb that doesn’t go off) were dropped in their garden. His memory was faint when asked if he had any troubles or trauma because of his experiences, but was also clear that he was very young and talk about the War was taboo, and the children were “sheltered” from knowing about the War. Aside from the combat related insidents, roleplay in the forest as cowboys and indians were mentioned, but nothing too spesific about any long-lasting fears.  The Grandmother was also quite vague, but in an interesting aspect to our concept and suspitions. She had no spesific fears but, in her words, were afraid of the unpredictability in the dark. Something might be there, and therefore, she is afraid. Death was the only thing to be specified, and the living dead was something she definetly didn’t appreciate. As a real death was one of the only ways to get exposed to something we today get exposed through earlier with pop-culture, mass information and easily available and less sensitive entertainment, and all the “memes” that might get stuck on the cornea of a 5-year old today, was easily enough not available. But the fact that she still was afraid illustrates a valid point, which was talked about in an earlier excerpt, namely evolution.  As a 5 year old, it’s perfectly normal to be afraid of the dark as we’re hardwired to do so, and therefore survive. We are by nature a weaker fighter in the dark, and a reason to be afraid of ghosts, could be to have a peg to hang the fear on. The Grandmother was definetly afraid, but weren’t exposed to anything that her fear could exist as. 

On the other hand, the Grandfather were exposed to real things happening, so his fears might weren’t that hard to deal with as they most likely weren’t “debunked” by his parents or peers, or the fact that he was too young to understand the actual terror of it, but rather afraid the loud noises combined with the stress of evacuating.  

Another theory is that they forgot about their fears a long time ago, and shoved them in tray way back in their head, unavailable for discussion. A lot of people who recall having fear of darkness either remember their feelings or the actual visual memories that they imagined at the time.

We theorise:

After conversing with someone who newly or currently experience fear of darkness, certain nuanced visual memories may pop up. 

People who had very distinctive visual representations of their fear will remember it more vividly later on.

Children who have a good ability to rationalize early on may still be supported by actually finding some kind of visualisation to aid them, either way.

With this, we conclude week 7, and prepare ourselves for making 12 objects for the exhibition. phew

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Excerpts from weekly report 6.

After reflecting on how we can approach our users, we were excluded from Kråkeslottet kindergarten “friday pre-school” activities due to general illness in the facility. Instead of stuffing our ideas in a backpack and spend extensive amounts of time consulting users one after another, we figured we could just invite them all to one place.

(let me slip into something more comfortable)

A key problem when interviewing children about their fears and misconceptions are their guardians. Parents are understandably skeptic to the act of confirming their child’s fantasy, and we want to avoid the the doubt occuring before and during our interviews. After considering several possibilities last week, we began drafting objects we thought could act as a catalyst for sparking dialogue among our users and beyond. The exercise helped us realize that an arena for these objects could be presented in an exhibition. Through presenting in this way, we might end up getting more insight in a shorter time period than we would from the prior method.

Visiting dentist and mother of three from Report 5.

After arranging a visit, we presented our drafts to test our assumptions. She told us that since our last interview, she had asked him more about his fears. It turned out he didn’t just fear thieves, but vampires and zombies as well. We were eager to know how we could tackle this together with him. 

During our session with the son, we tried to softly apply our own assumptions and questions on him as we played and were showed around. He was as described by his mother, imaginative and floating, which also made it harder for us to pin him down on a certain subject, as he would drift off to show or talk about something else. We were not strict on this and tried to be patient in order to get to know him and his premises.

When we entered his room, we were presented with a number of handmade creations out of cardboard and hobby materials. He told us he made them to control himself, he mentioned a tendency of being “bad in his mouth”, creating things as a form of therapy for himself. He also told us that they had no specific function, but talked about them as the objects they resembled, for example a rocketship, a house etc. He told us they functioned as “decor” to him, and that they were made a long time ago. He now played video games instead. 

(decor)

As the session went on, we were eager to see which response our sketches would induce. Because of his fluid nature, we talked to him over the kitchen table with his mother being present, hopefully allowing him to focus more on our dialogue. He was clearly excited about our ideas, bouncing up and down and laughing in his seat. We saw this as a good way for him to spark associations to his own fear. At one point, he told us that a particular solution of ours would work on vampires. He feared them, as well as ghosts and zombies. 

(some of the idea sketches)

This is the point where we dove into his particular fears and fantasies.

He told us zombies were different from ghosts and vampires. He knew for a fact the latter were scary but not real. Zombies, however, were scary and could potentially be real. After asking, he said that zombies may exist when a normal person gets a “bad syringe”. This meant that a good syringe would turn a zombie back into a human. He said that in that case, zombies must be afraid of the good syringes. We concluded that a solution could be a drawing of a good syringe or something that resembled it. His mother, who is a dentist, said she has lots of syringes at work, and that she could bring one with “fake antidote” to hang on his wall. That way, the zombies would be scared of the syringe and run away. He was very excited about the idea.

An important note on what unfolded in our encounter was that his mother was quite skeptical when it came to actually confirming his fantasy. When he mentioned the potentiality of zombies being real, she denied it. An interesting point here is from the fact that zombies have gained mainstream attention because of the actual potential of them being real. From pharmaceutical history, we never really know if zombies will or won’t exist. What this means is that he was completely rational in his statement, and that all she said in denying the statement was for the purpose of relieving fear. Though when based on conspiracy, she would have had the base for believing the same thing.

If anything, this says something about what adults believe to be the best for their child. There comes a point where parents simply have to tell them wrong, and to try and stagnate their flow of fantasy. This action is irrational, because telling someone wrong either presupposes that they’re able to rationalize their own fear, or that they don’t trust their childrens ability to understand the limits between realistic perception and imagination. This is where the discoursive separation between child and guardian lies. Rationalization can only lead to stagnation. Parents want to help, and nurturing fantasy can only affect in a productive manner, the clue is to know when and how this can be done.

Moving on.

Through the exhibition, we want to decipher the question of “how” and “when” through dialogue. Within the next two weeks, we will prepare our first designs based on the drafts and objectify them. We’ve set a relatively short term, and hope to be able to rent a gallery and and prepare 10-15 of our ideas till due. The exhibition has to be communicated clearly to the visitors. Here is where both the branding and the user journey comes in. We’ve already drafted an example of a user journey to follow for now. 

The branding will be complementary to the exhibited objects, and communicate ambiguity between children perceiving adult objects and adults perceiving child objects. To this, we’ve made a conceptual moodboard. We realise that we will have to create a clearer moodboard to give clearer disclosure on what we want to achieve with our exhibition. This will be the main challenge to tackle together with the objects in the next weeks.

(conceptual moodboard)

Concluding initial statement. From an evolutionary aspect, fear of the dark is a useful tool which stems from the actual danger of being alone in the dark. As a tool, is makes the child anxious and afraid, and seeking comfort from parents, or other sources of safety. An interesting aspect of instinct-based fear, is the fact that there might not be anything threatening at all. On basis of instinct, children might therefore be afraid in situations or of objects that parents don’t find threatening, and the children are in the actual danger of not being taken seriously. 

We are born with 2 fears from birth, the fear of falling and of loud noises. When the child is a few months old, they have connected strong relationships with their parents and separation anxiety becomes a problem. Being left alone in the dark, and therefore establishing a fear of the dark, is just one of the aspects of separation anxiety. When the child’s imagination becomes more vivid, the fear changes from being just separation anxiety based, to the child being afraid of things they see, hear and fantasize about. This is the period, as previously stated, that the child may not be able to rationalize the fears they have, and have a problem separating reality and fantasy. The parents obviously don’t see the threats the children feel as they may be absolutely irrational and imaginative. 

Later in childhood, the fear of the dark moves further and further away from the separation anxiety, and more on actual beings, situations and objects that might have been introduced through friends, pop-culture or their own experiences. At this point, the child is afraid of something that don’t necessarily exist in the real world, but it a definitive threat in their eyes. As their threats are based on fantasy, we would argue that the solutions to these fears could be fantasy-based too.

adjø

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Excerpts from weekly report 5.

While waiting for dates on research meeting with our users, we’ve reflected on how we should approach both families and kindergartens. we have also specified the motivations, approach, results and conclusions to how we imagine our service to end up.

Approach:

Before children have fully developed their ability to separate fantasy from reality, they have no apparatus to rationalize their conceptions, or often misconceptions. The first step in maintaining a wild fantasy, which is the door to an intuitive creativeness later in life, could be tackled through confirming these misconceptions. This is also to make it easier for parents to navigate the fluid fantasy of children. By basing our approach on fear of darkness, we hope to loosen the communicative relationship between parents and their children’s imagination, for the advantage of both parts beyond that particular type of fear.

Results: 

We want to provide children with a relief in understanding their realities. Doing this through a guide split in two, one for parents and one for children, we will provide both parts with a tool to overcome fear of the dark together. From the process of this, we hope to gather insight to tackle other issues solvable by immersing into another person’s perceived reality.

Conclusion:

Children with fear of darkness leave themselves and their parents with trouble sleeping, and parents rarely talk to their children about it to actively prevent it. In addition to being a pedagogical startline for maintaining a creative ability, our service could be a powerful tool for serving the parent/child relationship, as both parts may earn a greater understanding for each other. This can only be possible if a parent is willing to dive into the child’s fantasy and “bend” it into a progressive and educational scenario for the child, and thus hopefully teach themselves in the process.

(imagining possible observations)

Preparations for our first kindergarten visit.

We have been included into Kråkeslottet kindergarten's “friday preschool”, to get insight around our theme with the oldest children in the facility. Every friday they get together all 14 of the oldest kids and have a special program preparing them for school. We want to organize a workshop for them to get an impression of their thoughts on fear of darkness. We will base the tasks on ourselves in order to not target specific children in the group, 

We will present ourselves as afraid of the dark for the children, and explain that we came to them in the need for help. We want to give them drawing exercises to get visual impressions of their fear. This could very well be monsters under their beds or scary faces or sounds in the ceiling. We will improvise most of the arrangement, as we aren’t sure what the responses will be. As long as they’re having fun, we’re not worried about wasting time. 

In addition to the drawing activities, we want to talk to the children about their own experiences if it’s suitable. After talking to the 9-year old, who provided us with great answers, we’re still skeptical whether it will be a bigger challenge with the 5-year olds.

To confirm if this is an expedient way of getting the insight we’re after, we will present our findings and plans for the kindergarten visit to the child psychologist Katrin, and get her feedback on our approach. We’re anxious of whether it might be problematic to “build” on the children’s fantasies groupwise, where they might play on each other and increase the seriousness of their fears.

At the same time, we want to try to make the day as playful as possible, where the degree of seriousness is low in all aspects, and where avoiding the possibility of someone bringing home negative experiences as thorough as we can, and one of our goals is to give the impression that talking about fears is actually fun and educational. As child psychologist Gunnar put it; The first step of handling a fear could be to get an understanding from an external source that they see that you’re afraid. When we present ourselves in the same boat as many children, as they are usually afraid of the dark, we hope to easily start a dialogue.

(commuter-mapping)

Our plans were to spend most of this week doing field research so we could begin with our test designs next week. However both the kindergarten and the family we contacted responded late on their availabilites. We hope to take the preparations we did this week into our encounters next week, as we are quite itchy to begin actually creating something after 5 weeks of dialogue and mapping.

see you then

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Excerpts from weekly report 4.

On Wednesday of week 4, we specified our brief further with a decision on designing for fear of darkness, where adults could potentially engage with children in an imaginative way. 

Why do we want to design for child delusion?

We want to design for two main premises. One is superficial to the other. The general reason is based on the unavoidable fantasy bubble of children. it is not possible to make a young child think rationally because of their underdeveloped cognitive abilities. What a parent can do is to either nurture or falsify their delusions. nurturing means to ask questions and embrace their fantasy, either by objectifying or acting. as scientific approaches requires falsification, creative thinking requires exploration. We believe this is something that should be nurtured at an early age.

The second premise is a specific instance of child imagination running wild that is probably the most commonly known. Fear of darkness is something that both affects child and guardians in two ways. 

When persistent, one problem is reduced sleep, this primarily impacts the adult, but also children if they stay awake through majorities of the night.

The second way it way it may affect them both is from attempts of solving the issue. This links the second premise to the first, as adults often will have to make creative effort in relieving fear through fictional stories, objectifications, acts and rituals.

(wild mappin’ pt.2)

We’ll spend the next week having conversations with parents and guardians of children who are afraid of the dark. We also want to talk to children about their personal relation and fear of darkness. In order to do the latter, we need to get insight from a psychologist on good ways of approach them correctly.

We had a conversation with a dentist and a mother of three children. Her two first are 9 and 12 years older than her third, and her third is 5 years old. He is the first of her children to show fear of darkness. It is not extensive, but it has periodically been marked.

He is very different from her two other kids. He is way more imaginative and floating. His parents have attempted at asking what it is that he is afraid of. Every time they have asked, he has responded that he is afraid of the thieves. He is a relatively closed personality and he doesn’t want to talk about subjects for too long, especially if they can be a bit uncomfortable. (We speculate that it also might be because of the fact that he is actually afraid of other things, such as supernatural beings. In that case he might be shy in telling about it to his parents as he possibly feel that it’s only in his head or that his parents wouldn’t believe him). They have tried to tell him that they have an alarm system in their home and that thieves can’t get in, but it doesn’t seem to help.

When he goes to bed, he has to have the lights in his room on. Nightlights are not enough. He often wakes up in the middle of the night. His parents bedroom is at the same floor level, across a living room. when he wakes up and is afraid, he runs as fast as he can across the room and in to his parents bed. There have been a few occasions where he had been so afraid that he shouts for his parents to come over. They carry him out of the bed and into their own bedroom. Every time he wakes up and is afraid, his parents have have been interrupted in their sleep to comfort him.

Finally. She told us that she has no problem with “tricking” her children as a way of helping them. She recalls using up to 7 band aids on her first two kids whenever they got a scratch, as well as giving them jelly beans and calling it “magic candy”, easing their pain.

(The hot dog stand)

From a conversation with a 9 year old boy. He used to be very scared of the dark, but at the moment he wasn’t so scared anymore.

We began asking about whether there were anything in particular that he feared. He said no, that he just felt a general fear wheneved he’d go to sleep. We had a bit of trouble believing him, recalling for ourselves that our own memories were often of expecting a particular situation to unfold.

After digging a bit more, it emerged that he had a number of fears that were very particular. They were not just the main manifestations of his fear but also the reasons - or at least what kicked off the fear in the first place.

It turned out that he was exposed to characters on the internet, either by accident or through friends. The first character was “Jeff The Killer”. A so-called “creepypasta” - fear memes circulating the internet. He stumbled upon the image when he was googling for an author that he enjoyed reading who had the same first name. Same story goes with the second character “Momo”, who has circulated the internet and among his friends. He also recalled one of his earliest fears, when he was around 4 years old. It didn’t come from an image or a character, but interestingly enough, a song. He hummed the song for us, and it turned out to be the theme song of the TV-series X-Files. Again, probably something he encountered on the internet as it was broadly circulating as accompanying music on internet memes about the conspiracy theory of the illuminati movement. 

(Touring AHO with a 9-year old)

Then we asked him why he wasn’t scared anymore.

He recalled how the face of Jeff The Killer kind of looked like a potato. He imagined that he cooked the potato, cut it into slices and ate it. It was very funny, and the moment he thought of that, he wasn’t scared anymore. The same story was with Momo. A friend had told him that Momo wasn’t human, but a quarter dog, and half chicken. He then imagined that if Momo was a chicken, he could cut it into pieces and make chicken nuggets out of it, again making it funny.

(Left: Jeff The Killer and a Potato, Right: Momo and a Chicken Nugget)

We got a lot of important notes on his experiences. Most importantly, we have found a brilliant instance of a child twisting the image of their fear into something harmless.

It is also interesting to hear that his three main fears came from internet Creepypastas, and we’re curious to how widespread fear of darkness are among children just because of memes.

Lastly, we’re also interested in observing how often parents interfere with their children by talking to them. In both interviews and conversations otherwise, parents spend surprisingly little energy on asking their child about what it is that they fear. 

One way of observing this as we move on would be to talk to the child first, get insight on what their fears are or have been, and then talk to the parents afterwards to measure a potential knowlege gap between what children percieve and parents see.

We will bring these four conclusive sections into week four and dive futher into placebo, child delusion and fear of darkness.

mm

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Excerpts from weekly report 3.

We’ve spent this week on finding the user group that we want to focus on. In correlation to our brief, children stood out as an odd and interesting group to represent placebo design.

(wild mappin’)

User.

Working with placebo, we’ve had to pay a lot of attention to what the object of authority is. To an adult, the object of authority is often not fluently imaginative. Here, a delusion or belief is normal in that it might empower a limited quantity of individuals believing the same thing. Examples are religious cults or conspiracy theorists, who use their “delusion” as a personal representation, again based on say, reactions to political or social misfits. Designing for organized “misinformed” groups may be from strengthening beliefs in order to radicalize their position and belief further, or to communicate their belief by manifesting it.

Compared to our observations so far on “organizational” placebo, children with “false beliefs” are rarely organized in groups larger than personal or local(neighbourhood or close friends).

Speaking with parents raising children, one can either allow them to confront themselves in their falsehoods to see personal meaning in understanding, or they could confront them as a guardian and a person of authority(comforting, getting scolded).

In this case, a placebo would do neither. An example: being afraid of the dark. Instead of leaving a child to confront their own fear, or having a guardian check under the bed or in the closet every night, a placebo would say “yes, there are creatures in your closet, and this device will protect you from them”.

(afraid of the dark-shield)

Designing for children to the parent.

As “conventional” placebo design uses agency based on belief that doesn’t stem, either in reference or manifestation, from a fictional object(E-meter as a “functional” object, or medication that has been proven to work from before). Placebo design for children could be categorized as an extended form of dramatic agency, where the design isn't meant to induce vivid fantasy, but that vivid fantasy itself makes the design relevant. Again, potentially allowing the object to be communicated as a source of dramatic agency to an adult. 

What we mean by this is that we want our proposal to take shape as a serious design service in correlation to the typical modern everyday design. The actual function of the services, however, will be directly derived from child fantasy and imagination. It will be a highly relevant object in its own right, and thus hopefully, ending up as an intersection between the floating mind of a child, and the not so floating mind of an adult.

(fairy door plaque. if a child has a worry, they place their hand on the plaque, lighting up in red. once the fairies have arrived to remove all traces of worry in the child, it becomes green)

We have also spent some time reformulating earlier statements, as well as assuring important notes on what to remember when we communicate what we think it means when we design for placebo.

Revisiting the differentiation between placebo and manipulation.

“rather than affecting or “changing” something about the subject, based on the self perceived values of the designer; manipulation. Placebo design would observe what the object of authority is to the subject, their belief. Maybe something superstitious like indications of luck, or a conspiracy theory. The designer would then try and manifest that trust in to an object or a service for the main goal of giving the subject a sensation of confirmation.” 

- On the other hand, this makes placebo the worst kind of manipulation. As a service and as a product, placebo foresees a necessity based on clear subjective and subconscious superstitions, and may seduce a user into buying and using something based on anything else but a rational need, and potentially having them succumb to a parent or external system utilizing them.

(mapping meeting about mapping)

We’ve had 5 user interactions this week.

We wanted to start off by talking to people we see as experienced with understanding children, before acutally interacting with children. We begun with our closest examples, our parents, and moved over to people who are experienced with child pedagogy and psychology. We gained a lot of insight and confirmation through these five conversations.

Hermans mother; childrens book illustrator and mother of three.

Mats mother: foreign educator and mother of two.

Line Håberg Løvdal: child educator.

Kari Coventry: Child educator and kindergarten worker.

Katrin Glatz Brubakk: Child psychologist.

Quotes from our conversations:

“there is nothing wrong about confirming delusions when it comes to children. doing the opposite is worse. it can be compared to talking away problems instead of confronting them.”

“children often fantasize stories or characters based on their thoughts. for an adult to understand the feelings of a child, they have to take their imagination and all their characters, stories and places seriously.”

“what you are doing is concretisizing. parents and guardians often play out fantasies by creating objects or scenarios based on the descriptions of the child to concretize.”

“the more abstract your service is, the more it can appeal to more children, yes. but it will in more occasions also run the risk of it being used as a playtoy. take the wooden building block for instance, it can really be anything and it allows for their imagination to run wild. consider what scenarios you want to design for.”

“to see this politically. nurturing child imagination is to make way for free thought later on in their life. in this society, people will be confronted with plenty of restrictions and actualities beside childhood.”

(”crying cream”.

placebo for children could potentially represent and illustrate the ethical questions in parenting)

Agenda.

In week 4, we will be visiting a kindergarden to hopefully get to know our user. children are known to be difficult to interview, as they usually drift off and talk about other things. we hope to utilize just that when documenting imagination. hopefully, we’ll find something to either describe, trace or concretize about wandering minds.

We’ll also try and get more background info from experts as we did last week, as soon as we’ve interacted with children and maybe landed some joints to our design.

God dag

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Excerpts from weekly report 2.

We’ve spent most of this week visiting Berlin. In doing so, we tried to come to terms on figuring out a clear agenda for how we want to work on the design for the coming weeks.

(On ze Autobahn: In conversation with Lise Amy and Vera)

Introducing our project to Lise Amy and Vera.

So far, we’ve had loose plans on making our project mound out in a discursive direction.

We want to make a speculative design gathered in a service with either objects or touchpoints that build on placebo. Beside the service coming out as economically sustainable, the question remains of why we should be confirming delusions in selling services for feeling good. In many ways, the project would end up as a form of satire. Making it mock design runs the risk of the project not being taken seriously, which is something we don’t want.

(In conversation with Kaja)

Discussing users with Kaja.

Based on our conversation with Kaja, we were confronted with defining what the “behavioural” outcome of our service should be. Kaja gave examples of delusions about climate change, where a placebo service could design for climate change conspiracies. Perhaps curbing opinions and disbelief in a progressive direction through some sort of reverse psychology.

This would make the placebo element in our service a tool for targeted change.  Apart from creating a service that uses reverse psychology to affect change, it would also be rather cunning of it to pretend having the same opinions as the user to achieve a single goal. However we won’t yet deny this being a potential direction as we might end up with something that relates to Kaja’s idea.

(Journey documentation)

Once we finally got home from Berlin, we used the last friday of our second week to have a conversation with Lars Marcus Vedeler. During our conversation, we realized that we still, at this point, were relatively vague in our project agenda and direction. We got a lot of good opinions and references on what to think of underway.

Some important notes from the conversation:

We are still in the ground course. Doing something speculative or discursive at this level of the education is a relatively bold move. We need to be very considerate and serious in sticking to our brief, and make sure it can be categorized as service design. We run the risk of only being evaluated on how it corresponds to that particular field of design.

It’s way too easy to do humoristic design. Being ironic can make a project seem shallow and unserious.

Your service should tell a story that the user accepts as true and not a story of the actual truth.

Make sure to pipeline the service design project and the knowledge you get in parallel if you’re going to propose both material and its substance/reflections in the same proposal.

-

As for now, our agenda concerns a designed service that proposes a product or an experience that gives a placebo effect. The purpose of this project is to cast light on how the effect otherwise occurs in commercial design, and so, how placebo design could differentiate from design methodology typically used. 

Through our own interpretation of placebo, our proposal will communicate the benefits and side effects of placebo design. We will do this by exploring how a fictional placebo design service would look like, whether it’d be a service design studio, a manufacturer or a communicative service like a psychiatrist.

We will spend week 3 exploring ideas and begin the actual design. We will be doing interviews with relevant experts/users, and use our ideas as guidance material for the interviews.

thanks

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Excerpts from weekly report 1.

As of Monday 26th, we formulated a field of interest after discussions of themes from infant music to irritations with good intentions. The field of interest we chose to dive further into was the placebo phenomenon, its relevance and connections to design.

To get a grip on the phenomena itself, we looked to two articles we found interesting;   

S2: https://www.wired.com/2009/08/ff-placebo-effect/).

(S1: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00494, and 

Essentially, placebo can be viewed as something that doesn’t function objectively, but purely subjectively.

The phenomenon stems from physical sensations triggered by either a condition based or conscious expected trust in pharmaceutical techniques or medication. They act as “a catalyst for the body's endogenous healthcare system.”

Placebo is generally categorized by conditioning and expectancy, as well as a fictive “side effect” called nocebo.

The conditioning placebo relies on an inert expectation from the subject, based on either a purely endogenous reaction, or subconscious sensation. An example of the latter would be how someone with a strong disgust for crab sandwiches, become nauseous and sick simply from someone mentioning “crab sandwiches”.

The expectancy placebo is based on a conscious trust to something else. That something can be a person of authority (a doctor or a civil engineer), an idea or an object.

Anything that takes up a role of authority against a subject, could potentially be used to induce placebo. This is by caution to seeing that it leaves the subject to their own trust and belief in the external authority.

Placebos can also have “side effects”. This is called Nocebos. A nocebo may occur when a subject is presented with multiple outcomes from the measures presented by the thing of authority, where the nocebo would be the negative outcome. An example of this: Men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction, were twice as likely to become impotent. Since neither the positive placebo nor the negative nocebo are “real” reactions, it would be a hard task to start deducing “why” the subject would react to either. However we would argue that a positive and a negative effect would be based on mood and maybe even the level of trust towards the object of authority.

Scope.

Manipulation in design is very effective in optimizing practical tasks and processes. However when inducing new habits towards political or ideological values, it gets dodgy.

This is where we feel placebo design differentiates from manipulative design. Rather than affecting or “changing” something about the subject, based on the self perceived values of the designer. Placebo design would observe what the object of authority is to the subject. Maybe something superstitious like indications of luck, or a conspiracy theory. The designer would then try and manifest that trust in to an object or a service for the main goal of giving the subject a sensation of confirmation.

our three specified directions are the following:

A manual or a test program for designers to check if a design proposal is placebo.

A service design version of Fiona Raby’s placebo project.

An extensive line of products based on gathered “false beliefs”

So far we’ve landed on the latter two. Our perception of odd and extreme beliefs and opinions circulating society is more prone to visibility through social and digital channels. 

A placebo design service would seek to comfort and strengthen those opinions by designing for them. Instead of homogenizing a large group of people by making them commit to a narrower functioning service, our idea would do the exact opposite, but still be gathered under a certain “brand” to represent the outputs.

Another thing we did this week.

Portable maphub.

A primary agenda this semester was to try and not be too centralized when doing research and design. Based on how mapping and post its are usually being limited to flat surfaces, we built a portable mapping surface. We want to experience how “working around” could influence our habits and thought processes, as well as utilizing the opportunity to map while interviewing subjects and being in meetings.

This panel neatly wraps up week 1. Next week we’re travelling to Berlin. Since our scope is still relatively vague, we have contacted and and are hoping to find someone who can be resourceful for explorative reflections with Mats & Herman.

Bye