unexpectedthesis

[unexpectedthesis]

Diagramming

I began this last week by designing a diagram as part of our Thesis II course. My first approach was to create a mind map for myself showing where my work lies in a variety of areas and the concepts they touch upon. The goal was to cover the range of products in my thesis to help me to identify the scope of my work:

In looking at this map, a few issues popped up:

The terms I used had some overlap (magic and theater) and seemed in some cases a bit arbitrary. I had to either highlight the fact that I had intersections in my work or change the names of the categories.

The typology of mind map wasn’t helping me to achieve my goal of exposing the whitespace or opportunities for other work.

I mapped the concepts that I was exploring but my projects weren’t actually listed on the diagram.

The diagram itself wasn’t the tidiest and could be more refined.

For my revised version, I reorganized the information into quadrants to create a 2x2 diagram:

Here we can see clearer distinctions of the spectrums in my work: between analog and digital and work that is either passively experienced or actively participated in.

I mapped all of the project titles so I can more clearly understand where my work currently falls. I had a large white space in Actively Engaged and Analog so I decided to shift my upcoming experience design project into this area to round out the range of my products (it was previously analog yet more passively experienced).

Because this map is for me and to help me decide where I should be spending my time in terms of new work, I also added the layer of current level of fidelity. This way, I can focus my attention on the projects with lower levels of fidelity prior to including them in my thesis presentation and book.

[unexpectedthesis]

Context, Channels, and Factors

To understand the users my thesis is working for better, I developed a series of personas to check my work against. The first is a 29 year old Upper West sider named Gregg who is labeled a “tech dude.” You can see more of the persona in the initial framework below. 

To serve his need for increased opportunities for experiencing wonder and awe, I flushed out some of the context, channels and factors for potential solutions. The context in this case refers to all the circumstances surrounding his need. Things like Gregg’s fixed routings make it difficult for experiencing unexpected moments. The technology he uses each day is considered magic as he lacks real understanding of its workings, but he doesn’t appreciate this fact because he is surrounded by it. He doesn’t have any unallocated free time in his life because its taken up by other activities like socializing, watching Netflix, and researching the latest gadgets. His ability to effortlessly access knowledge and information from anywhere with his phone has decreased the amount of unanswered questions he sits with resulting in a lack of mystery in his life. 

The channels through which I can reach users like Gregg involve some untraditional approaches. As most people aren’t actively searching for the type of experiences I am producing, my users need to stumble upon the opportunities and then be convinced. This could mean flyers on telephone poles, word-of-mouth, banner ads on websites or billboards. Ironically however, the experiences have to remain unique with just enough information to capture them without giving away too much information. This idea inspired channels like hidden cues like Toynbee tiles, public stunts, mysterious banner ads, secret societies, white rabbits, and gardens of fish with hidden QR messages inside them.   

When thinking about the factors to keep in mind when developing solutions, I have to do testing to see if the same events produce wonder for all the same way? Do people understand the message? Does it inspire long term behavior change? How do I make experiences rare while keeping them accessible? How do I keep secrets while convincing my users to attend or purchase objects? 

Here is a photo of the post-it note workshop session that developed these ideas. Enjoy its unique perspective.

[unexpectedthesis]

Methodology

Below is a draft of the methodology chapter for my thesis book:

By methodology, I am not referring to the secret methods by which illusions are created but instead of my approach to developing this thesis project. My design method takes a far more open form, where I researched through a combination of texts, articles, and videos as well as primary interviews with subject matter experts. In the creation of the products for this work, I’ve tried to remain open with the processes involved and collaborate with my peers to develop my ideas further. Although I still believe in the power of surprise and magical effects with hidden secret workings, this thesis is more in line with Maskelyne and Devant’s concept for magic as written in Our Magic. They believed that by exposing the craft behind the illusions, audiences would further appreciate the magic as art. By sharing the psychology and thoughts behind my ideas to my users and peers, I feel their perception of magic was able to change.

Beginning in the summer of 2016, I looked broadly at an area of inquiry surrounding the ‘unexpected.’ By beginning this openly, I was looking for opportunities to create a framework to help me develop experiences that evoked emotions around surprise like wonder and awe. As I read about the psychology that makes surprises work, superstitions, belief, randomness and even physiological effects like piloerection (goosebumps). Though this thesis began as an exploration for my work, I found myself on a journey to rekindle my own sense of wonder in the world.

To supplement my research, I needed to fully experience the emotions I was looking to design for so I placed myself into as many unexpected situations as possible. This included immersive theater shows without prior knowledge of the content, dinners with strangers, walks through the city with no particular destination and even travel to other countries where I didn’t know the language and was clearly out of place. Through each experience, I began to understand that in order to feel wonder, you need to remove yourself from the ‘everyday’ and bring about some change.

To further understand how others worked in these area, I spoke with over 24 diverse subject matter experts who ranged from magicians, educators, authors, a variety of artists, AI researchers, and a blue man. These people push and pulled my thesis in a variety of directions and provided provoking insights into their professions and lives which I used to form connections between them all. These connections eventually led me back to my background in magic because of the power the art has to create the feelings I wanted from my work.

To reexamine magic from a design perspective, I returned to magic books looking for writings about magic’s potential and cultural relevance throughout history. Using other’s thoughts as inspiration, I developed an understanding that traditional magic performances aren’t the only way to create ‘magical’ experiences for people. How can we usher a new form of magic into the world that combines traditional elements of the art with other allied fields? Is there even a separation anymore?

In the Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, we are taught that “products” take many, if not countless, forms. Instead of focusing on industrial design or the design of just physical objects, our products range from digital to physical and encompass services, platforms and apps, systems, and experiences. We develop minimum viable prototypes by using everything from Arduino to writing press releases. The projects developed through this thesis process are the result of looking at my topic through all these product lenses.

This book will outline my process further, not necessarily in order of production, by showing the products that resulted from my journey into the world of wonder.

[unexpectedthesis]

Ontology

Below is an ontology of linguistic choices I have made for my thesis to date. I have placed asterisks next to the words that still need definitions or may need revisiting. 

Experience*: an encountered event. Philip Fisher in Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences writes that “the ordinary is what is there when there are no experiences going on.” Rare experience*:   

Surprise: a feeling we have when something happens unexpectedly.  

Wonder: Descartes’s definition from Philip Fisher: “the act of noticing with pleasure something new and unprecedented.” The next level up from surprise but usually tied to a rare experience. 

Awe: I will be using the definition of awe laid out in Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger’s book Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected. “Awe is surprise that’s stirred by something unfathomable vast or complex." 

Magic*: This is the most difficult term to define for myself and it’s taken me up to just about a week ago to make a decision. By magic, I could use Miriam Webster dictionary and say "having or apparently having supernatural powers”. Or I could follow with Beth Corbin who says “if you know what magic is then it is not magic. Magic is magic.” Magic can be a feeling, a type of performance art or even a card game. 

The definition I am moving forward with is from psychologists Rensink and Kuhn: “the experience of wonder that results from encountering an apparently impossible event.” This encompasses the performing art of magic but also when you witness something that you would feel is impossible for humans to do. 

Impossible*: The following magic terms have some debate amongst magic theorists but I will outline how I plan on their use: 

Illusion: a magic effect performed by a magician (in most glossaries, illusion is tied to being performed on a stage in front of a large audience but in my use I don’t distinguish a difference in venue)

Effect: how a magic illusion is perceived by a spectator. If the spectator were to go home and write about what they saw, this would be their description.

Gimmick: secret part or object used to make the illusion possible.

Flourish: showy move which displays handling skills. Prop: any item used in the performance of an illusion. Routine: sequence of effects. Venue: category of location where the illusion is performed (ex. closeup, parlor, stage, TV)

Method: the technique the magician uses to achieve the desired effect. 

Trick: This word has had the most debate so I plan on using it as little as possible throughout my writing. Some use the word to describe the method or secret workings of the illusion, while sometimes it is synonymous with what a magician performs, or the illusion itself (‘a magic trick’). Some also feel, as Chris Goto-Jones writes in Conjuring Asia, that the word is “subtly derogatory about the activities of magicians because its implication is of triviality.” If I do use the word, I mean it as a verb, to fool an audience member. Because really, magic is a trick. Spectator: an audience member watching a magic show or effect.

Participant: I am working to shift magic from being a spectator activity to an interactive one so this is the new word I plan on using for the partaking individual. 

I’m going to finish this post with a quote: 

“How vastly different now is everything in magic; gone is the true magician, here is the mere trickster, the man who unconsciously has adopter the modern style, which kills his own effects. Gone the true mystery, gone the startling wonderment of the audience, to be replaced by the cold query “How is it done?” -Servais Le Roy

[unexpectedthesis]

Goals

Today we continued to define our goals and objectives for our thesis work. This does not merely entail “get a degree” but instead what is the real intent and motivation behind the work? From the beginning of the process last summer, I knew that I wanted my work to allow me to build skills I hadn’t developed yet. At this point I believe I want to work within experience design after graduation and specifically designing interactive installations and environments. After applying to some companies in this realm last summer, I know there are several areas I could improve on to better position myself for that work. I’m also extremely interested in specific mediums that I wanted to explore more. I created a series of performance continuums to plot my progress and goals for my thesis project and the first relates to this broadening of skills.

I feel that at the thesis defense and today I have been pretty much squarely between improving my existing skills vs broadening or acquiring new skills so I know which direction I need to move with new projects.

The second continuum relates to my thesis topic directly and how I’d like to redefine what magic means and how it is considered to the public. In Michael Mangan’s book Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring he asserts that modern magic is considered “low culture.” This means that magic isn’t held in high esteem but instead meant for the masses or the less educated. This is fascinating if we look at Rensink and Kuhn’s definition of magic: "the experience of wonder that results from encountering an apparently impossible event.” If magic creates an experience of wonder, this sounds like some other fields that more closely align with the arts, or high culture. Why can’t we redefine magic for the public as a way to encounter unanswerable questions and get in touch with our irrational minds again? We have so few opportunities to stop and experience wonder and awe in our everyday lives that magic seems ripe for use. As Darwin Ortiz says in his book Strong Magic, “if magic has any claim to being an art it lives in its unique ability to make a spectator confront the impossible, along with the exhilarating feeling this entails as a trapdoor opens under everything he thinks he knows about reality and his mind goes into freefall.”

And the third continuum is how I seek to redefine magic. Mangan says that “conjuring is all about power – of one sort of another” and Jay Sankey states “puzzles reek of a desire to control the experience, while mysteries only bloom in moments where the performer relinquishes just the right amount of control.” I think that creating a form of postmodern magic, we can break one of the meta narratives inherent in modern magic, a performer holds the power and performs to an audience. Now some could say that many acts involve audience participation and they create the magic with the participants but I feel that even the existence of some barrier or stage can limit the potential power magic has to affect an audience. How can we create experiences for users to hold the magical powers themselves or see the magic around them instead of only witnessing another individual with the abilities? Can we push magic into other typologies and utilize traditional experience design schemes to transform the magic performance into an interactive immersive environment?

To pull back the curtain a bit, here are some photos showing the process behind creating the cleaner graphics shown above:

[unexpectedthesis]

Audience

As my thesis has shifted more squarely in the realm of “magic”, I have struggled in defining a user group for my work. From the beginning, I have decided not to design for magicians for several reasons. At the risk of alienating and potentially stereotyping magicians, I’m going to outline some of the problems with this user group that I have seen. I feel as though I can write this because I once thought in many of these same ways and because these points have been validated throughout many of my readings and research. Again, what follows does not apply to all magicians. 

-Many magicians copy other magicians. From single effects to entire acts, characters, scripts, secrets, really everything. There isn’t much recourse other than self-policing within the community so copying is rampant. You could say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but I think in magic it goes way beyond this. There is a serious lack of creativity amongst many performing magicians, amateur and professional. Because watching a magician perform is still a rare experience, the chances that you see one magician perform the same effect as another is so low, that they don’t worry about being caught. David Copperfield in the final issue of MAGIC magazine wrote an editorial piece about just this, and implores for magicians to begin to ‘listen’ to everything around them for inspiration. He says “please, never, copy anybody’s work. But do tap into the universal emotions that inspired those creations."  

-Many magicians don’t consider their audiences. Magic is a strange art in that you can’t really ask the audience what they would like to see on stage. In paraphrasing illusion design Jim Steinmeyer, if you had a chef cook someone a fancy 5 course meal, they may absolutely love it but if you ask them what meal they would prefer, they would just say pizza. Magic is about creating the impossible so magicians feel that audiences may have a difficult time imagining these impossible scenarios. When this becomes the job of the magician, in order to rehearse or ideate, they turn to practicing with other magicians. What Paul Ekman calls ‘duping delight’ takes over, as magicians begin working to fool each other, and lose track of their intended audiences. In Copperfield’s editorial post I mentioned earlier, he writes “Walt Disney once said, ‘Comedy, to be effective, has to relate to the audience … When the comedy loses that relationship with the audience, it becomes meaningless and just silly.’ The same could be said about magic.” 

-Many magicians fear magic. In Eugene Burger and Robert Neale’s book Magic and Meaning, there is a great conversation about how most magicians are afraid of magic. This comes out when magicians perform a miracle and immediately follow it up with a joke or hokey line to break the tension. Why can’t magicians let the feeling linger - really hit the audience? Burger says “it is as if these magicians are embarrassed by the whole idea of magic. And so they transform conjuring into something silly and cute.” If audiences pay to see magicians, why ruin the entertainment with ridiculous patter?  

-Much of magic lacks meaning. This goes along with the last point, as Eugene Burger says “we need to understand that our goal is to link our magic with meanings, with life experiences that express our common humanity”. Derren Brown, a British mentalist, says in his book Absolute Magic, “magic is not inherently anything. It is what you sell it as.” If this is true, then we certainly need to imbue our magic with meaning as most performances are devoid of this apart from a superficial level of having some power that the audience doesn’t have.

There are other points to make with all of this, but to the second point above, I have decided to focus directly on ‘audiences’ or people who should experience magic for one reason or another. Instead of trying to shift magicians away from their approach to ‘modern magic,’ I am working to design magical experiences for my users in order to produce an alternative to magic stage performances. 

In developing the personas for my users, I already have a couple similar people in mind. The first would be people who already engage in the performing arts but in a participatory way. Immersive theater, karaoke, magic shows, are all things that they have engaged with in the past but are open to new experiences. The second type of person are the ones who need an experience or product to bring some mystery and wonder back to their lives. They are possibly bored or disenchanted with the world and open to more. The third are people who are actively searching for meaning - I call them explorers. These are world travelers, foodies, and yoga enthusiasts (not necessarily all together). People who enjoy life but actively look for more meaning through travel and experiencing new things.

In all these cases, I think that a quote from Einstein is relevant. "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery— even if mixed with fear— that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms— it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

This is my goal, to bring this sense of mystery into people’s lives and inspire wonder and awe, that may or may not be missing.

As mentioned, I have specific people in mind for each of these 3 types of personas - people I interact with in life and within my friend networks. Over this next week, I will be filling out a spreadsheet with the categories and names of the people I know, as well as searching for meetups around the city that relate to their interests to plan out some interviews and get more information. Aside from some starter questions, the more direct items I am interested in asking my users are:

-Do you seek out new experiences? -Do you feel like you have wonder in your life?  -Do you ever feel a sense of awe?  -How often do you feel these types of emotions?  -Where do you go to experience awe?  -When thinking of Max Weber’s disenchantment of modern society idea, do you feel this is true? 

I’ll continue to develop my list of questions and post my results as I move forward.

[unexpectedthesis]

Last Month

To bring everyone up to speed with my progress in the past 2 months, I have:

-designed and prototyped a sustainability focused product that recaptured waste heat from hot water pipes to power small devices (it only produced a maximum of 3.3v with 5mA of current though so it was only enough to power a small piezo speaker to play Jingle Bells for about 3 minutes)

-designed and prototyped a different sustainability focused product that imagined a partnership with a the non-profit water.org. The theory of change here was that if I could develop an effect using low cost, recycled props, then water.org’s volunteers could easily perform with them on the street in order to gain the attention of larger groups of people ultimately improving their ROI. I created the following prototype of a training video for the volunteers to show them how to perform the effect.

-produced a prospectus book documenting my process this past semester including a glossary of terms, descriptions of many of my book and article readings, details of my subject matter expert interviews, all the prototypes I developed and a section looking forward to the next semester. The book was printed and will serve as the beginnings for my final book I will produce over the next 15 weeks. Here is the cover of the book.

-pulled together a 7 minute thesis defense presentation of my work and attempted to illustrate the direction I was moving on. Over the course of the semester, I’ve decided to focus on how my experience in both magic and design make me uniquely positioned to look at the art with a different lens. Moving forward this coming 15 weeks, I look to explore further how designers can craft experiences that harness the ability magic has to evoke feelings of wonder and maybe even awe. How can we design these experiences to shift people’s perspectives and potentially drive them to action?

I began a new course today with Abby The IA, Abby Covert, where will be working to make sense of the mess we have found ourselves in with our thesis topics. Each week I will update this blog, more diligently, with writings about not only my current work but also specific aspects of my thesis to attempt to bring this all together by May. Stay tuned for more in the weeks to come! 

[unexpectedthesis]

Created a video of the Cut and Unharmed Hard Drive effect from earlier in the semester to better illustrate the performance.

[unexpectedthesis]

Women in Magic

Over the past two weeks, I went through a couple of design sprints working through how my thesis could inspire services and mobile apps. I’ve had a little bit of a shift as I decided to focus on magic after my co-creation workshop. How can we use magical principles or borrow from the magic community to design for larger issues?

This week I began with a problem statement: magic is mostly a male dominated form of theater. By addressing the stereotypical male image of a magician we can create opportunities for more women in the performing art. 

To tackle this problem, I began by focusing on implementable programs and products that can easily scale. 

One idea here would be to create after-school programs for younger children using magic as a self-confidence boosting tool as well as a way to break down gender roles. Many boys get into performing magic for a feeling of control and power, so how could we reach young girls before social pressures take hold?

Looking at some data, I found that anywhere from 3-5% of members in magi social clubs are women. One of the reasons here is because these clubs were male-only since their inception. The Magic Circle in the UK didn’t begin accepting women until 1991. 

Along the same line, could we rename some organizations like the International Brotherhood of Magicians to the International Fellowship of Magicians?

When thinking about shifting the public perception of magicians, I realized that most people have never seen a woman ever even perform magic. This is somewhat ironic because if you look through history women have been performing with men from the beginning. One of the biggest setbacks, however, happened in the middle of the nineteenth century as women performing magic were associated with witchcraft. One particular case in the fifteenth century wrote that a man could perform a torn-and-restored handkerchief effect and be labeled a magician while a women performing the same was tried as a witch.

Some other sketches involved networks for women who wanted to transition from being magician’s assistants to magicians themselves.

I ultimately decided for this week to focus on reframing perceptions, of both the public and the magic community. 

My solution requires a bit of history and explanation though. The Royal Dynasty of Magic is a mantle that has been passed from generation to generation of magicians since 1896 with Harry Kellar receiving the honor from Alexander Herrmann.

Kellar passed the mantle to Howard Thurston.

Thurston passed it to Dante.

Dante passed it to Lee Grabel who then passed it to Lance Burton who has the honor now. Lance Burton recently stopped performing his show in Vegas so I’d expect the honor be passed along again soon.

The other concept to explain is that of a cast magic show. This is where the magician doesn't write the whole show himself and also doesn’t perform as himself or a caricature of himself but instead is cast into the role much like a Broadway show. Directors, writers and choreographers all work to make the show a success as most magicians aren’t versed in all aspects of the theatrics required for this scale of show. A good example of this would be with the Bamberg family lineage of magic where they performed large illusion shows as completely different characters. Theo Bamberg performed as Okito.

With all of that in mind, I’m excited to announce that the Dynasty of Magic is continuing on with magic’s new rising star: Tasia (pronounced Taz-ya)!

I envision Tasia as a cast role magic show so the lead could change but would always be cast as a woman. Here is what a campaign for a show on ABC could look like:

By doing live shows as well as TV specials, I feel that we could reframe the public’s, as well as magician’s, perceptions of women in magic.

[unexpectedthesis]

Conjuring Futures

This past week I ran a co-creation workshop to ask some questions I’ve been having surrounding my thesis. Here is a story of the results of the endeavor:

On a cold and wet Saturday afternoon in a space in Chelsea, Manhattan, cards were placed on a table asking for the definition of one word, magic.

9 damp participants stumbled into the room and were asked to leave their expectations at the door, along with their wet coats. They knew magic was on the agenda, but where it would go nobody knew. They each filled out the cards with answers ranging from: magic is getting away with it to magic is when inexplicable things happen that delight you instead of frighten you. 

A brief lecture ensued to illuminate this group of non-magicians. After a few magic definitions, they were exposed to a very brief history of magic, but with a little bit of a unique perspective. I’ll recount a couple examples from this lecture because it’s required to understand the framing for the rest of the story. 

In 1904, Harry Houdini was known as the master of escapes. He could be chained up and locked in any box and escape. This captured the attention of audiences all over the world because it was a metaphor for their own lives, an affirmation of the human capacity to overcome adversity.

Another example is in 1921, P.T. Selbit invented the illusion of sawing through a woman. What else happened in 1921? The end of World War I. He designed an illusion that showed a woman being cut in half and then restored at the same time that the world was desensitized by war and needed a new more shocking style of magic.

The point was that magic has the power to transform its audiences. Or at the very least provide a brief release, a catharsis. How can we design magic tricks for our time that have this same power? This is what the participants explored that day. 

The arrangement was reoriented and the everyone broke into teams. With these groups they had to come up with what the zeitgeists, collective traumas, calamities or issues are of their time. Discussion broke out. 

Their responses were varied. Little did they know though, this was the easy part of the workshop because from they would have to fall deeper into this theme and come up with a magical effect around it.

Now, because none of them were magicians, they were given some magic effect classifications to help get them started. Here they could see things like production, vanish, animation, and thought transmission. They were let loose on this for a while and what they came up with was amazing. They created drawings, scripts and even names with amazing puns as all great magic tricks have.

But that wasn’t all. Before letting them think any further, bags of dollar store materials were dumped in the corner of the room and they were told to dig in and build the props needed for their effects. They had very little time though as they they only had 5 minutes until they would also have to perform their effects. They finished their cutting and gluing and then rearranged the room into a small theatre complete with snacks like oreos and popcorn.

And then, the real show began.

[I will put up GIFs of the performances soon]

I’m pretty sure this was one of the first times an audience had been asked to come up with what magic tricks they would like to see and the results were fascinating. The hand gestures, elaborate narratives and ideas were all aligned with traditional magic effects.

The main takeaways for me were what people found to be magical. We found that magic is: getting away with it, when the hair raises on your neck, being manipulated to believe the unbelievable, a bit like humor - unexpected results based on understandable premises, bewildering our senses, when humans do super-human things.

Each effect the participants developed brought up even more interesting questions and possible directions for my work.

Does bringing technology into a traditional theatre magic show allow for an unexpected dichotomy? Can magic have a place in the everyday where daily expectations place us into a loop? It’s easy to force yourself into that loop but how can we make the outcome not only surprising but also positive? How can the title of magician shift to others that have “powers” or abilities? Hackers? Artisans? In a VR experience, how can the environment around you shift so you feel that this isn’t just passive but that you are really there and participating? How can we take magic, which is sometimes seen as something frivolous, and make it meaningful and relevant?

[unexpectedthesis]

Future of Storytelling

Over the past two weeks, I have spoken with 24 subject matter experts ranging from magicians and educators to AI researchers and a member of the Blue Man Group. I plan on continuing this part of the process, with several more interviews lined up for this week. 

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Future of StoryTelling (FoST) festival on the Upper East Side. I was skeptical—knowing that many of the displays would be using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology, which I haven’t had the best of experiences with. To me, using these technologies always seems like I am stepping into a game, rather than engaging meaningfully with the narrative. This could be because most of the experiences are built upon either the Unreal or Unity platforms, both game engines. I tried to keep an open mind while listening to the panel discussions on 'World Building and Storytelling’ and ‘Stories That Surround You.’ These talks were inspirational and gave me many insights into the industry and the potential for the technology. 

On Sunday, I walked into the ‘playground’ space, where over forty VR, AR, and MR (mixed reality) experiences awaited. I was excited to try everything and be blown away, but unfortunately, found that the stories themselves were disappointing. The science fair format of the exhibition did not allow people to become immersed in each interaction. The head-mounted displays (HMD) were mainly the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear, and I found each one disorienting. It wasn't that the head-tracking was bad; rather, it was more that I couldn’t see my hands or, if I did, they looked like I had become Mickey Mouse. After about 5 minutes of being in virtual space, I had a headache. In the VR theatre, I was disassociated from every other member of the audience as I went into my own world. What is the point of a theatre if there is no interaction or collective sense of feeling?   

Image from Samsung’s Gear VR Theater at CES 2016.

The best moment during the playground was when I was unexpectedly pulled into an immersive theatre performance. It was a 1-on-1 experience complete with eye-contact and the illusion of agency. It began as a conversation with another festival goer — ‘Frederick’— who had his left arm in a sling and his right hand holding a mirror by a wire. Before I knew it, I found myself walking up 5 flights of stairs to a balcony where I sat with my new friend. After a bit of a chat about Central Park, I was thrust into a paranoia-inducing moment when a bright red light began blinking at me from across the park. Decoding these lights using Morse-code, I translated the message as R-U-N.   

Was that reality or virtual reality? Are these experiences just for gamers or people interested in a special brand of theater? With new technology like Magic Leap around the corner that can create a whole new world in front of us, place fantastical characters in our bedroom, and transform everything into a digital surface, how do people cope with the normalcy of reality? Magic will be everywhere and become accessible to all. Where does wonder in reality fit in? Do we need incentives to remain in the real world or will it become novel? Will we eventually get to the hedonic treadmill moment with this technology and what will that look like? What is the role of the magician in this new reality - when a child can make things levitate and appear in front of herself instantly, how do we create rare experiences?

Still from a Magic Leap demo video

[unexpectedthesis]

My brain this week after 14 interviews.

[unexpectedthesis]

Thesis Class - 9/26

We dove a bit further into our prototype explorations for this week and I decided to focus my attention on a new idea. What if we could subvert the normal expectations people have with QR codes?

QR codes have become completely ubiquitous for containing very little useful information to consumers. Businesses use them all the time for shipping and logistics but consumers can mainly just get URLs or strings of text from scanning the codes. I thought it would be interesting to make the codes do so much more. So I built my first app! You can view a demo of the app here: 

The app is called QRchestra and each unique code triggers a different sound effect which when put all together plays an orchestral piece. I look forward to working more with concept in the future. For now I focused on a works-like prototype but I see many other potential opportunities for the idea that involve experiences for others.

Some of the feedback I received was that as soon as we hear the first note, we have an expectation of how the song will end. I agree that this is true, however, I look at the idea more from the perspective of not knowing what the QR code will do in the first place. Once you learn that it plays music, you can enjoy the fun of the experience.   

I’m not sure that the thesis title about the unexpected is the right course because it could easily just become randomness. At what point do people say "yes you are right, that was unexpected" and not “well, the ending was expected.” And to what end does it matter? If your friends throw you a surprise party but then the party that follows is just a group of your friends sharing cake and eating pizza, do you say “the fact that the party happened was unexpected but really the party was exactly what I expected after that?” 

This week to come will involve me interviewing as many people from as many fields as I can to try to get a grasp on what the unexpected means to them. We’ll see what insights I can glean from the "randomness".

[unexpectedthesis]

Thesis Class - 9/19

This week I dove into my area of inquiry by drawing 100 sketches and seeing what came out of the exercise. My sketches ran the gamut from musical experiences and backwards pedaling bikes to a navigation app that helps add some surprises to your day by taking you on unexpected detours. I prototyped a few of my ideas and found that most of my ideas were quite performative in nature.

I started with a piece of paper with a sentence written on it. By using a magic technique I obscured a secret message that was only made visible after a lighter flame passed under the words.

Another prototype was looking at ideation itself and how we could foster more cross-fertilization across fields. I’ve used several random object generators online for ideas but found them too restrictive to normal everyday objects. The prototype cross-fertilization generator I created takes random wikipedia articles and serves them up for inspiration.

The results the generator produces were a bit too broad for now but unexpected idea generation is an area I’d like to continue exploring in the future.

My last prototype was an exploration into the idea of taking an action and its expected result and seeing if I could reframe the action. The effect was that a hard drive was plugged into a computer using a USB cable, the drive mounted and was able to be accessed as normal. After establishing this norm, I had someone use a pair of wire cutters to cut the USB cable to find that the hard drive still functioned as normal, even without any visible connection to the computer. The cut USB cable could then be unplugged and replugged back in and the hard drive would still be connected to the computer even with a cut cable.

One unexpected result of my performance was that the amount of work I put into my prototypes wasn’t recognized. This is because most of the details were secret and I performed them as if they were effortless. Moving forward, I’d like to explore ways of creating perceived value around my work. I also want to push my work into more of an experiential area as building normal “props” doesn’t seem like the right direction. This is the course I’ll likely take for this next week.

[unexpectedthesis]

Thesis Class - 9/12

Today was our first thesis class where we outlined the process we would be working through over the course of this semester. Aside from seeing the intense schedule and amount of work before me, my biggest takeaways were that I still need to think more about potential user groups and my topic. Knowing that I want to dive into the unknown of the unexpected and understand more fully how to produce the feeling of astonishment or awe that is so difficult to elicit these days, I have a sense of the direction I’d like to move in. Some notes that I wrote down of things to think about are: -Bring the heat to the topic -Look for dichotomies -Find a metaphor and try to reframe the problem Over this next week I plan on diving into all the notes I wrote this summer on my readings and see what I can pull out to define my thesis topic better in addition to getting my hands dirty in the making!

[unexpectedthesis]

Immersive Theater

A friend of mine recommended that as part of my thesis research I go to some immersive theater experiences. I’ve heard of Sleep No More before, but had never had a chance to go see it. However my friend mentioned another show called Then She Fell which she said was a more intimate experience. It was with this recommendation, I purchased the expensive ticket for the next weekend. 

I’ve been thinking about one passage in the book “Wonder, The Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences” by Philip Fisher, which notes “for the full experience of wonder there must be no description beforehand that will lead us to compare what we actually experience with what we were told, or even with the level of expectation raised by the one who told us to close our eyes.” Because of this idea, I specifically didn’t research anything about the show beforehand. The only thing I knew was what my friend had said about the intimate audience size and the fact that it was based on Alice in Wonderland. This may have been too much information already but I tried not to hear anything else. 

Having been to many theater shows in my life (I used to be an architectural theatre consultant), I already had certain expectations. This was in addition to the expectations I felt when reading the pre-show email that had the usual show information (although there was one line that said “our environments include water, ink, and beverages that can potentially stain clothing or shoes. We do not take responsibility for patrons' personal items and advise you to keep this in mind when dressing for the show.”) From all this information, I formed my list of expectations:

There will be actors of some kind

I may be forced to participate as it is labeled an “immersive” theater experience.

I may get ink on me?!

Alcoholic beverages will be served during the show (said in the email)

It’s going to be amazing.

Most of these turned out to be true (no ink on my clothes though) but there were plenty of things that occurred during the “show” that I was certainly not expecting.

I always encounter this problem with this blog in that I don’t want to give away too much information in case a reader wants to have these experiences for themselves. But on the other hand this is a space for my thoughts. So we’ll fix it by ending the blog post here if you don’t want to read the spoilers that are coming up next.

The show was incredible. I’m not sure I fully understood the entire plot nor who all the characters were but I was made to feel central to the story. Only 15 people are allowed in per performance and everyone comes out having a different experience. During the first 5 minutes of the show, I was pulled away from the group and down a hall in the old church we were in. I was placed in a tiny room by myself that was filled with roses from floor to ceiling. A small table was in the middle of the room with one white rose on it. Just as I was about to touch it, a woman dressed in red runs in with a man wearing a white shirt and a white vest. I learned later that this man was the rabbit but for the moment I was very confused.

They danced in front of me with a large knife until the red queen left the room. With just me and the rabbit left, he handed me the rose and continued to dance around the room. When he put his hand out while standing on top of the table, I was unsure if he wanted my hand or the rose but decided the rose was the best option. He placed the rose into the mass of roses running across the ceiling and then handed me a white pearlescent cane with a white rabbit on the top. Opening the door behind him he gestured for me to follow him to another room.

I won't nor can’t write everything that happened that night but with a combination of solitary moments and group encounters, it was something I won’t quickly forget. Most shows don’t involve personal conversations with actors about love, card tricks with psychiatrists, or laying in a tiny bed with a complete stranger but I experienced all of that within the two hours. The part that stood out the most though is all the eye contact you have with each of the actors throughout the evening. At times they make you feel welcomed, loved, scared, like you don’t belong, but always a part of their world.

Having gone to this event by myself, I determined that I would try another, the next night, with a friend. We trekked out to Brooklyn again for another immersive show, although slightly cheaper this time, called Quiet, Comfort.

I’m not entirely sure what happened during the course of this show but it all happened in a beautifully detailed set that felt like a giant hotel room where the entire floor was a large mattress complete with box springs. 

You can read a much more detailed review here that echoes many of my opinions of this show:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/theater/review-in-quiet-comfort-a-mattress-becomes-the-audiences-magic-carpet.html?_r=0

The bed was very cool though.

[unexpectedthesis]

Steve Cohen’s Chamber Magic

I haven’t gone to see a magic performance in over a year and at this point in my research I felt it was time. 

New York City is known to be a breeding ground for some of the best magicians. In addition to Tannen’s Magic shop, which has been open since 1925, there are quite a few mainstay magic shows in the city but I’ve never actually seen any of them. Specifically though, the Chamber Magic show has been on my list for years. 

  Steve Cohen has been performing his Chamber Magic show each week at the Waldorf Astoria for 16 years. With word-of-mouth only advertising, expensive ticket prices, small audience sizes, it’s been difficult to get tickets or bite the bullet to go. I’m so glad I did though as I was unaware that this will be his final year performing at the hotel due to the upcoming renovation effort. 

The show is different from most other magic shows I’ve been to as it’s a very traditional parlor setting. On the 35th floor of the hotel is a private suite filled with 60 chairs and a small wooden table. Instead of typical magic shows where you have to deal with raked seats and card tricks where you can only make out the pips through the use of giant projections, here you are just feet away from the action. This, along with the fact that everyone has to dress up in their finest gowns and suits, means that you walk into the room knowing that you will have an intimate magic experience. 

Mr. Cohen tries to touch each person in the room one way or another through his performance. He uses lots of participants as assistants in the effects and in one mind-reading effect that lasts a good portion of the show, he makes a huge effort to include as many people as he can. This is where the show really excels. 

When I go to magic shows, I can’t help but try to figure out how the effects are accomplished. I don’t do it on purpose - I just see the secret moves, recognize the apparatus or know the typical methods for certain effects. It’s rare that I put that aside and can focus on the other parts of the performance but there is so much more. The magician’s character, movements, storylines and patter, audience management, and direction are critically important. I’ve seen many magic shows in my life with some of the greatest and most famous performers but the way Mr. Cohen manages and works the audience is some of the best I’ve seen. 

  The seating pricing is tiered from reserved seats in the front to the “cheap seats” in the 4th row. For two of the effects in the show, Mr. Cohen pulls the back row to the front of the room and creates an impromptu ring around him that makes the magic feel even closer. When looking around the room at these moments, everyone looks engaged and a part of the show. If you seem to be drifting, Mr. Cohen will bring you right back in because he understands that to be his role. 

When doing mentalism effects, the best performers know that your audience can give you some of the best material all on their own. There were multiple times that Mr. Cohen would lead an audience member one direction only to have the person elevate the effect with their reaction. In these moments, Mr. Cohen would use that to his advantage and make the magic seem even more unbelievable. You have to be very quick to recognize these potential jewels and he caught all of them. 

  Performing the same show each week for 16 years can make a show feel stale. Really though, a performer can just get tired or run out of steam. When Mr. Cohen walks in front of the room, he looks as excited as he must have been performing the show the first time. This enthusiasm carries the show to the very last trick where he is jumping up and down with excitement as the audience gives him a standing ovation. 

I honestly don’t even care about the tricks themselves, I’ve found that part of the experience to be the least interesting for me. The performer himself and his care to every detail and action is what blew me away. This probably sounds like a review instead of my thesis thoughts but what the hell - if you have the chance to go see Steve Cohen’s show and elevate magic to the art it should be recognized as, you better do it now before it’s gone.

https://www.chambermagic.com