2007 RCA Research Concept project
This project started with gathering stories. Stories of real people in extreme situations, stories of people suffering from paranoid personality disorder and paranoid thoughts. The stories were the starting point for questioning and designing new ways of mobile communication, embodied in three concepts. This was a project for O2 in collaboration with Industrial Design Engineering.
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THE DELUSION IS IN THE EVIDENCE
Edward and Maureen are happily married for 35 years. Yet Edward recently found out his wife wants to kill him. He knows that, because every night, after dinner, Maureen points her fork and knife right at him.
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REALITY IS HERE
Ruby has always been afraid that nothing is real. As if she was living in a kind of 'truman show', where people pretend nothing is going on. This summer, she will go on holidays to Paris but she's afraid it will all be fake. She thinks there is no such thing as different cultures and languages. She's afraid Paris won't be real.
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THE SANE BIT
Jonathan is one of many people who thinks MI5 wants to kill him. He thinks they are tapping his phone and spying on him and it's only a matter of days before they will strike. Yet, in stead of going to the police, he handed himself over to the doctors in a mental hospital.
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CONTAGIOUS DELUSIONS
Felix is a man in his mid-forties. Since a few weeks, he's convinced he has this weird disease where his penis is slowly retracting in his body. Not knowing who to talk to about his embarrassing situation, he wrote a letter to his friend George about it. After a few days, George was suffering from the disease as well.
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OF COURSE YOU CAN...
Roy is a young man. Last year, he all of a sudden stopped talking and ever since he didn't talk to anyone. It was only a week ago that his psychiatrist found out the reason for his abrupt communication disorder, the psychiatrist asked Roy whether he stopped talking because he thought people could hear what he was thinking. Roy didn't say a word but nodded as if nothing was more logical than this.
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I AM HERE NOW
This is a mobile communication device with a very big button. To be available for calls, one has to press the button all the time. This concept questions the situation of constant and unconscious availability we find ourselves in.
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KORO
Koro is a communication device that comes as two sticks and allows one phone call. By breaking the sticks apart and giving half of it to someone else, you allow that person to call you or be called by you once. The value of this one phone call lies in the way you deal with it. If you give that girl in the bar half of your koro, how long would you keep your half? And would you ever leave your boyfriend's half at home, risking on missing his call?
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TALK TO YOUR SANE SIDE.
This is a communication device to yourself. You take it with you, like an umbrella for bad times. Whenever you feel uncomfortable in a certain situation, you extend the stick and the camera takes an helicopter view from yourself. You don't see the images realtime but they're stored somewhere where only you can access them anytime later. The device serves as a guardian angel, providing you with a helicopter view in uncomfortable situations.
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