My Group Project
Among the three assigned fiction stories, Folding Beijing, Newton’s Sleep, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects, our group decided to derive our idea from Folding Beijing. One of the important reasons that induced us to make this decision was that we were all touched by the cruel and cold-blood hierarchy as well as the indifferent humanities revealed in the fiction stories. Besides simply creating certain interactive objects to look ahead to the future technology development, we also placed a hope that this interactive object we made could arouse people’s awareness of social class discrimination existing now and then.
When brainstorming what kind of interactive object that we could make, we discussed a lot. Some of us proposed to make a small model of the whole folding Beijing in which we could show people our illustration on how the system wrote in the book might be achieved, based on what the book described. But we felt that it was too hard for us to display the idea with simple objects without any support from electronic devices. Although it may be possible, still, it will be hard for us to act in a way that everyone can understand. More importantly, this does not best fit our initials which is to raise people’s awareness of social class discrimination. After a really long time of silence, we finally came up with an idea, making an interspace elevator, based on one of our teammates’ idea in his blogpost.
To display our concept, we use the laser cutter to make a flat circle that represents the three spaces. And we use one horizontal plane to indicate the alternation among different spaces as time moves on. Also, we use part of the water bottle to create a tube where the elevator can move inside it. It is a simple prototype for our idea, although it may not be complete and work really well, but we fully display our idea and concept through our presentation.
To make the elevator more interactive, only giving it the property to send people to cross spaces is far from enough. Therefore, after a few discussions, we finally decided to make our elevator able to scan its potential passengers, speak out the identity, and detect their purposes of going to other spaces. Also, to fulfill our initials of arousing people’s attention to social class discrimination, we tailored one story for our group project, which contains two groups of main characters. Two characters are from the first space, one is a professor, the other is her secretary. They are going to the third space to do the required research about garbage classification. The professor can get a direct promotion as long as she goes to the third space, therefore, she is not really taking the research seriously, while the secretary who was born in the second space and is currently doing an intern in the first space keeps reminding the professor of her duty and even directly contradicted the professor. Here in our story, the professor is one representative of authorities who rarely pay efforts but own great power. They do things in a sense of formalism. As for the secretary, she is a typical, or to say, an ideal representative of people who live in the first space but still try to be true to themselves and never forget about her original intention. We put an end that the elevator is monitoring all peoples’ daily behaviors. Therefore, in the end, the elevator did not allow the professor to go back to the first space since she had not done anything about the research, while the secretary who kept reminding the professor of taking this research seriously was easily permitted to get into the elevator.
The other two characters are from the third space in which no one is permitted to take the elevator to get in upper spaces. They are mother and daughter, both of whom are trash-classifiers working in the third space. The daughter was really curious about how the first and the second space look like, and her mother told her that she could not get in those two spaces. However, accidentally, the daughter found the ID card that the professor (in the previous story) lost on the ground. So, she tried to cheat the elevator so as to go to the first space. Nevertheless, the elevator is clever enough to find that out. But we wanted to embed more humanities to the elevator. Therefore, we let the elevator find an excuse to persuade the little girl from taking the elevator, instead of simply rejecting her and exposing her lies.
Generally speaking, I think our group project is quite a success, not only in our design ideas but also in our story-writing and performance. Speaking of some drawbacks, first of all, I think that we may be able to make an exact three-space world if we have enough time. Second, I think we may need more time to polish our story and make it more fluent and aligned with the original settings described in Folding Beijing. Last but not least, I think that we can do more researches and propose our more detailed hypothesis of how our invention might be realized.
Another Group’s Project
I would like to write about the group whose project’s title is “Folding City”. I choose this group mainly for two reasons. One is that their invention was also derived from the fiction story, Folding Beijing, just like us. The other reason is that the performance’s format left me a deep impression. Unlike all the other groups, they used pantomime to perform their design. This really fascinated me. However, there are also some drawbacks that I identified in their group project. One is that their idea was almost completely displayed through their performance. And the small object they made had accounted for a really small part, and it was hard to tell what role that object was playing in their design. The other is that their concept of having a folding city was quite intriguing but the logic of how it really worked was not fully illustrated and clearly stated. But, since their basic idea is great, I think they can produce much better work and a fancy project if they have more time.
Photo Documentation:
Rehearsal Video:
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