Week 1

In the first lecture we were shown how this subject will pan out over the next few months.

We all split up into small groups and were told to brainstorm ways of how to communicate messages through objects without using anykind of words or numbers. We chose a variety of materials to start with, they were: Wood, Rubber, Metal, Water and Fabric. From there we focused on two materials, Rubber and Metal. We chose those two because they are completely different and we thought they could convey very different messages. We then specified what each material was, the rubber we made into a block approx 10cm x 5cm x 2cm and the metal into a hand full of stainless steel ball bearings.

The way we conveyed the messages were fairly different. For example, conveying the message "i'm angry" we would drag the rubber block along the ground making a noise, we got this from when someone is angry they sometimes drag their fingernails along a surface to make a noise. But for the ball bearings they would be violently thrown onto the ground causing them to fly everywhere, again we drew this idea from people throwing things to the ground in anger. We found that the rubber was the easiest to convey messages with. This was becasue it was more deformable than the metal was. Because we could do more to the rubber we could convey more messages.

From all the ideas we came up with we saw that the messages we were trying to convey were closely related to the behaviour expressed in that message (as i explained above).