Published in 2010
essay
Designers are called to create and build visual relationships among other things. This process requires that we tolerate pleasure and frustration — the pleasure (and often suffering) that comes from original and unique thinking — with the frustration that our solution may be rejected, or labeled as ineffective. To achieve an internal balance between frustration and gratification is what is known as homeostasis, or being in a state of equilibrium or stability. How do we do this, and why is it important that we learn these techniques?
To be asked to create something (at times, out of nothing) requires a certain amount of aggression (to move toward something; to bring out something). “Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.… These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another.… The sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death. This conflict is set going as soon as men are faced with the task of living together.” (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pgs. 122 & 132) The stimulus and response methods I use in teaching the Design as Experience class activate our most primal sense of survival. A striving for homeostasis must be achieved in a civilized way.
The technique by which I teach the class utilizes modern psychoanalytic techniques as a methodology where creative impulses are initiated, observed, and responded to. Understanding emotional communication becomes increasingly necessary to dynamic media interactions. “Emotions are measurable physical responses to salient stimuli: the increased heartbeat and perspiration that accompany fear, the freezing response of a rat in the presence of a cat, or the extra muscle tension that accompanies anger. Feelings, on the other hand, are the subjective experiences that sometimes accompany these processes: the sensations of happiness, envy, sadness, and so on. Emotions seem to employ largely unconscious machinery.…[They] are brain states that quickly assign value to outcomes and provide a simple plan of action. Thus, emotion can be viewed as a type of computation, a rapid, automatic summary that initiates appropriate actions.” (Eagleman, D., “Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain,” Discover Magazine, August, 2007)
By paying attention to their feelings or sensations, students learn to pay attention to the moment, to what unfolds in front of them or beneath them or from within. These moments invite conversations as part of a developing relationship. “One cannot not communicate. Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value: they influence others and these others, in turn, cannot not respond to these communications and are thus themselves communicating.” (Watzlawick, P., Some Tentative Axioms of Communication, pg. 49)
The introduction of objects, a word, a gesture, an experience or the like, induces uncertainty and we are faced with the unknown. The unknown sparks ideas that surface while individuals are directed elsewhere. It is as if the solution creeps into consciousness while the student is being directed elsewhere. While attempting to make some sense from the problem at hand, a revelation becomes apparent. “This new knowledge confronts us with dangers that we seemed to have mastered long ago, raises thoughts that we had not dared to think, stirs feelings from which we had anxiously guarded ourselves.… These psychological experiences are of such a nature that they must be suffered.… Suffering consciously experienced and mastered, teaches us wisdom.” (Reik, T., The Courage to Not Understand, pg. 504) Theodore Reik states that it takes courage to not be influenced by the obvious explanations. At times, the path we choose to follow will be tested and perhaps even ridiculed by others, by intellect and reason. “He who is always listening to the voices of others remains ignorant of his own. He who is always going to others will never come to himself.” (id. pg. 507) I ask each student to participate in a way that is unfamiliar to them; to challenge what they know; to test the boundaries of what is tolerable. At times, it is humbling. Most times it reveals something about the internal process of making — a repetition or pattern emerges, or an avoidance or resistance is discerned. Design as Experience class has become a foundation course in training students to respond spontaneously on impulse and to not worry about details. In broad terms, it asks that students come face-to-face with their feelings, fears, anxieties and parts of their process they have not been called to answer to professionally.
For example, when asked to create a visual response to granular white substance in a plastic bag (the substance given to the students was salt) along with the hand-lettered word adrift, Dennis Ludvino (MFA 2010) created an animation made up of all the readings he had received during that week of classes. Thousands of words bombarded his senses. How could he cope? Perhaps by destroying them in order to recreate something new might solve the dilemma. It did. It solved the immediate purpose of creating a visual response. However, as he stated in class, it also opened a door that he had closed off. This door was his writing past, the past that he had embraced since an undergraduate studying English. He loves to write and was faced with the requirement of visualizing responses. A small paper boat floating in a sea of words convinced him that he didn’t have to give it all up nor leave it behind. The small boat surrounded by a sea of words carried a lot of meaning for him; he had paid attention.
In the same way, Agata Stadnick (MFA 2009), faced the limitation of creating visual responses from a rope. The restrictions require that each student work with a rope made of sisal every day for 15 minutes. At the start of the daily project, students documented what they were beginning with; at the end of the 15 minutes they again documented what they had made. The same procedure is repeated daily. Agata’s work ranged from threads to sculptures, from objects to mobiles. The range of her work was explosive in detail and energy. Each day presented something new as she challenged herself: Could she make something completely different with each 15-minute chunk of time? While her classmates stayed within a certain comfort range, Agata overwhelmed all of us with her brazen departure. This courage followed her throughout her studies at DMI.
In relation to Agata’s connection with body and motion (for she was in motion even though sitting still) I brought Merry Conway (performer and acting coach in NYC) to spend some workshop time with the students. Merry challenged all of us to be aware of our bodies in space. She brought a different awareness of gesture, interaction, and reaction. During the two evening workshops, we as a group became more aware of levels of engagement and levels of discomfort. She challenged us to extend ourselves into sensory areas previously unfamiliar to us.
Merry’s workshop allowed us to feel more confident about body in space. The movement combinations passed around a circle from one person to another focused our attention on how we perceive movement and how we attach meaning to it. Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull in The Brain and the Inner World codify this type of movement as procedural memory.” It is a kind of ‘bodily’ memory. It is memory for habitual motor skills.… It allows us to learn skills and know how to do things.” Did this help us become actors? No, but it made us feel completely silly in a safe environment, where all we had to do was what was instructed of us. Paired up, we engaged in exchanges where one participant is leader the other a follower; then we changed roles. For us, who are not trained in observing physical cues, this was a new and daring experience. Some students discovered that they felt more comfortable in larger group participatory experiences, while others preferred a smaller pairing of partners.
In another instance students were assigned literary excerpts. They were asked to create a tool to serve the main character in the story. One of the stories was Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.” Briefly, the story follows the main character’s slide into madness where he is sure, as king of Spain, that he is being mistreated by authorities. Audrey Fu (MFA 2010), analyzed the story and presented a visualization of a ‘tail’ to assist the madman. This ‘tail’ protected him from hostility in the environment by serving as camouflage; as a robe, it provided warmth and kingly comfort when he felt neglected, and it functioned as a weapon if necessary. Audrey had unconsciously joined the madman’s defenses. Joining is a term used to describe a way of relating to a patient. Psychoanalyst Dr. Mara Wagner visited our class during the fall semester of 2009, and focused discussion around psychoanalytic concepts that facilitated a curiosity about emotional communication as it applies to characters in literature. She enlightened us with diagnoses and treatment disorders. Mara described the difference between the conscious and the unconscious as a beam of light which illuminates a small portion of a large, dark room.
Unconscious motivations played out in a very interesting way during that semester. Upon reading the three assigned short stories students were asked to choose one to bring to a visual form. I had wanted to pair up students, to continue exploring their visual responses, but how should I pair them? Upon presenting their visual responses to class, it was obvious that students had paired themselves (unconsciously) by thematic choices they had made. This was the first time this had happened in class. It was also the first time I had ‘team’ taught this particular project, in this case with Dr. Wagner.
Reflecting, as a process of inquiry. is a vital component to what we do in the Design as Experience class. Students are asked to write about their process and work through articulate verbal responses to inquiry. This method of reflection is inspired by my mentor and friend Anne West (professor and curator), who when I was in graduate school stated it this way: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say.” Inquiry leads the way to discover core concepts unique to each student’s experience. It is a private process, but one that offers a critical evaluation and thoughtful approach to understand why we do what we do. The reflective process of writing gives us the opportunity to discern our successes and failures and helps us understand where we are in the balance between frustration and gratification.
Questions we consciously (and unconsciously) explore are: What brings us to understand ourselves in relation to each other? In relation to our audience? At the same time, what distances us? What separates us from this kind of understanding? Distance can cause misunderstandings and conflicts, and can eventually tear apart the fabric that shapes us in a civilized world. Each workshop, each classroom discussion that brings to light the recognition of ‘the other’ facilitates empathy, awareness, and a responsibility to the participant, the audience. Awareness of message and meaning, empathy and emotion, user, participant, and context identify our role as communicators, as facilitators of interactions that examine new dynamic territories.
Gunta Kaza is Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design