[-empyre-] Fwd: the Friendship Jewellery

Wed Jun 1 04:20:25 EST 2011

Thanks Sarah for the links and a discussion of your project The Friendship
Jewellery. I did follow your links and I'm fascinated by your decision to to
categorize these pieces as jewelry. I was looking at particularly your more
recent project Migration.

http://www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk/sarahkettley/migration_sarah_kettley_craft_awards_colour_change.html/

 Can you talk a little more about that decision conceptually and perhaps
strategically? Renate

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 7:27 AM, Kettley, Sarah <sarah.kettley at ntu.ac.uk>wrote:

>
> Sure Renate, thanks for your questions -
>
> The Friendship Jewellery was a closed network (for technical reasons at the
> time), although the platform it used, Speckled Computing, is intended to be
> open and entirely peer-to-peer, the enabling technology of Ubiquitous
> Computing (see www.specknet.org). There were five neckpieces in this
> collection, using RSSI to ‘see’ each other; once selected and worn by the
> five women, the colour coded identities of the pieces effectively became the
> identities of the individuals, with references to them in conversation and
> reflection consistently intermingled. The pieces themselves were
> deliberately ambiguous in terms of both their place in the women’s world,
> but my initial dichotomous questions of device or decoration? technology or
> craft? turned out to be very naïve, as the women themselves were very
> quickly able to negotiate sophisticated hybrids of these not only as static
> meanings, but as fluid configurations dependent on their activities and
> interactions.
>
> The basic functionality of each node in the network is to identify other
> nearby nodes (within a range of approximately 20m in this case). The only
> information displayed is the identity of the other nodes found and whether
> they are distant (over 1m away), social (30cm – 1m away) or intimate (closer
> than 30cm). These distances had been arrived at through a combination of
> drama exercises and reflection on greeting rituals, but were found to
> correlate closely with Hall’s theory of proxemics (1966).  While identity
> and distance were reflected in the LED output of the pendants, direction was
> not – playing on concepts of seamfulness and the creativity of the wearer in
> wearable systems, this piece of information was deliberately left out so
> that the women would have to work with the environment to deduce the
> information upon which they would base social actions (approach or avoid?).
> By this I mean the interruptions and opportunities that certain building
> materials and architectural arrangements provide for connectivity and
> awareness of others in a space (we used the Royal Museum of Scotland in
> Edinburgh, UK to work through two games).
>
> Gender wasn’t an explicit topic of the work to begin with, rather I was
> interested in how a self professed friendship group could be seen as a
> distributed user. But, as they were all women of retirement age, (and to be
> fair, working with jewellery meant this was easier), certain questions did
> arise connected with how at that time (2004-2006), HCI still hadn’t managed
> to think much beyond the ideal individual fully functioning male body, as
> has been mentioned already in this discussion. Even the age group was a
> challenge for HCI, as until recently, there has been a tendency to treat
> ‘the elderly’ as a homogeneous group of over 60’s. This friendship group
> also demonstrated that marketing based on demographics is a hopelessly
> narrow approach, and that at certain life stages, we do not all choose to
> dress the same, or view the world in the same way, but that this does not
> diminish the power of our relationships, and our ability to express a
> collective belonging when in public spaces.
>
> This is an incredibly important lifestage to be designing for. The women
> were dealing with the loss of close relatives, family politics, the care of
> those close to them, and other friendships dispersed across the world. Some
> of them held high powered jobs, some of them are artists. One of them had
> just published her own PhD thesis. Working with them was both a privilege
> and a pleasure, and very humbling. One of them was buried last week.
>
> A full account of the project can be found in my thesis, Crafting the
> Wearable Computer, as well as papers documenting particular aspects of it,
> on my research webpage at
> http://www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk/sarahkettley/research_sarah_kettley_.html
> .
>
> Obviously there were many directions this work could have gone in. I
> pursued the theatricality of jewellery and shifted from the everyday to the
> gallery space, still working with the networked platform, and exploring
> sound (the ensemble project). See web pages for both projects at
> http://www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk/sarahkettley/wearables_and_tangible_interfaces_sarah_kettley_.html
> .
>
> Sarah
>
>
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-- 

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre

Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/

-- 

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre

Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/
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