Our group focused on creating an artifact from the story The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury. This artifact is intended to be a device used by the parents to calm their children down thus being able to interfere and get children help before their ideations become harmful, especially in the realm of the nursery. The artifact is a set of wristbands that connect to the nerves of the children and respond to their physical reactions to heightened stress. We derived this idea from this story as we all agreed that the story could have gone a lot differently if the parents were aware of what their children were feeling. As someone with panic attacks, I understand that anxiety, anger, and other emotions all manifest physically in some aspect. Because this story has the presence of the psychiatrist, I thought we could make an artifact that employs some therapy techniques. One I thought of specifically is that often ice on the back of the neck is used to ease someone having a panic attack or to ground someone when they are angry. This is why we have the device connected to the nerves, so we can employ these techniques and alert the parents to any strong reactions from their children. This artifact is interactive because it takes signals from the body, thinks on what to do, and responds by employing physical therapy techniques.
I think the artifact in general is successful. I think we did well coming up with an artifact that is related to the story and is interactive. Thinking back on it, I am not sure that we needed to have the parental aspect of the artifact if the main purpose is for the children. Our group worked together in a meeting to combine multiple ideas into our artifact, which I thought was successful. During this meeting we also distributed roles based on what everyone wanted to do. I personally built the arms and screens for the children and painted detailing on the work of the others. I also added an element to the arm for the purpose of the performance, to show the connection to the nerves of the children, although it was not implemented as planned.
Our group process was that we met twice, the first to divide roles and have some time between meetings to develop our parts, and the second to come back together as a group and run through our performance with our individually developed sections.
The group I would like to analyze is the group with the dream helmet. This helmet allowed people to see their dreams from the night before in a VR-type headset. I loved the design, I thought it was fun and made sense, especially with their use of the remote that comes in the ARDUINO kit as a controller. I thought their performance was great at showing what the artifact did, but I did not see the relevance to any of the stories. When explained, I understood why they developed this, because it was something they envisioned as part of the society of the Omelas, but I think they could have developed a stronger connection to the story. I also thought they did too much verbal explaining at the beginning of their presentation, but they also acted out what it did thoroughly so I do not think the explanation was a hinderance to their performance. Overall, I think their performance and design was fun and creative.
As for our group, the script was fairly short, but we had planned for more theatrical aspects to make up for it. I realize now that this was a mistake. We allocated the script to one person, and the rest of us worked to develop our physical renditions of our artifact. Our roles in the performance were the psychiatrist, the parents and the children. The communication within the team was good, and when we met together before the performance to practice I was very confident. However, on the day of the presentation, one of our group members began to go off script and I think it led to all of us falling apart. I was a little upset, because I had put a lot of effort into the design for my rig of the nerves coming out of the arm, and when we had discussed it we had all agreed that the parents would find out about the connection after the application of the screen and before the line “is it even safe”. This is not what happened in the performance. After this, I think some of us got anxious and some of us were not sure how to continue and we stumbled through the rest of the performance. Ultimately, I am very disappointed in how our performance turned out. I do not think it reflected the effort that we all put into this artifact, its purpose and connection to the story, nor did it reflect our original plans.
I have linked a video of the performance here.