The nintendo wii hack,

the illusion of control and the actual exercise

The illusion e.g. Starbucks coffee/ Nike ID , large companies/ corporations trying there hands at the process of mass personalization and giving customers a few choices for customizing their purchase. This includes companies like Dell providing a blog type platform for people to provide their ideas for alterations to dell products ( rather than making it happen in their own homes). Which then brings us to the other end of the spectrum- this includes acts like graffiti, hacking and genuine (profit-free) open source projects. Things like using a Nintendo wii to make your own interactive white board for 30 pounds. The next step is then of course to use the internet to show the world how they can all make this possible and implement it in their own homes/ communities without the interception (or permission) of any profit making organizations, stylists or highly psychological marketing techniques.

american pschologic business opinions

One of the things these business men seem to feel so much passion for is the slight differences that they choose to be applied to their business cards. They live lives that very much conform to consumer standards but these are actions that exit that system and exercise a different more innovative way of thinking, through this they gain strong emotional opinions and relationships with these objects.

The same thing can be said about starbucks coffee combinations, these are interesting and very subtle acts that go against most other behavior in the lives of these passive consumers. They live extremely standardized lives, in extremely standardized environments, however it can definitely be argued that the things they are most passionate about are acts of personal creation; “A frappachino please, with cold milk, a slice of warm lemon and three and a quarter shots of decaffeinated espresso, you must try mine peter.”

Some of the results from a youtube test questionaire.

Doing this was quite useful in showing me that it was not a very useful procedure to carry out in a more time consuming way. Some of the results are quite interesting but nothing extremely explosive or exposing. So here are some of the replies (i received about fifteen replies from about thirty five messages):

Actually first you should see  the message i sent:

” Hello fogassa,

This message isn’t actually from the rope swing collective and in fact I’m not quite as dexterous as they are.

I am actually writing to you as I wanted to ask you a couple of questions in relation to my final year dissertation for university, (I’m doing product design at Napier University Edinburgh)
My dissertation is about the effect that consumerism is having on the creative urge and creativity in general.                   I am focusing on the idea of “individual creativity in the face of standardization”,
Anyway you don’t really need to worry about that, all i want to know is:

What is it that initially made/ makes you take apart, mod, hack and play with these “finished” products or entirely make your own ?

What do you think this says about your satisfaction with consumer standards?

And lastly;

How do you feel about these objects once you have finished making them or after you have had your creative input?

I would really appreciate it if you could get back to me as soon as possible, don’t take this too seriously and if you have any other opinions feel free to include them, The more you have to say the better.

Thanks for reading (if you have that is)  “

And the results for question A—

“What is it that initially made/ makes you take apart,mod,                                                                                                                            hack and play with these “finished” products or entirely make your own ?“

• variation
• Just the fact that I like electronics,wanna customize them,because I can do it,don’t have the money to buy something;so I make it,for fun but also to kill my time.
• my initiative started from essentially to a taste for experimentation / creation in response to a need of the moment …
  in my case a little attached to my work and hobbies … usually when I need something, some equipment or material. I analyze the market, in relation of the price of a product that goes with my need. but sometimes in my opinion the products does not justify the cost, or because i do not have enough money to buy … and then i decide to try to reuse/reciclyng some equipments.. starting to hack/mod,etc…
• i just did it for fun at first but now i use it to get programs for free and make them look better (because i hate corprate grey on my programs :S )
• The reason I’m a hacker/modder is that I like to figure out how things work, then how to make them work for me. I like to test my abilities and see what new and interesting uses can be made of things that not even the original inventor envisioned for them
• I’ve always been a tinkerer. That’s just part of my curious side.
• like to mod and change things so that you can have more fun after exploring and using the rest of the product.
• I wanted to know how much does one need to know to make a 3d printer and not pay 20K for one.
• i made the mod originally because i loved guitar hero so much, yet i injured my finger playing on the guitar controller. so, since i was a drummer, and had some computer programming know-how, I was able to pick up the game again and play it without using a guitar controller, and use something that i’ve never had an injury on before: drums.
• I’m trying to build a 3D printer because they are very expensive to buy and because I saw that it must be possible for the motivated. A commercial printer does one part of what a 3D printer of the type I am building must do, it prints and does it well. So I have used the core of this product as a component in what I am making. I do this often as mass produced items are often an economic source of highly engineered parts. Take DVD players for example and the powerful lasers they contain.
• Well I used to be an xbox collector, (theirs lots of different edition xbox’s from around the world) anyway one day I saw The Rare White edition xbox console, I looked for it for a year, then when i had the chance to buy it , it was way to much ($950.00 USD)
  So I decided to make myself a replica. =)
  My own White Edition Xbox console.
  Then once i did that My Friend saw it and wanted one to, he then told me to mod it and show it off on youtube. And thats How I got started selling them to people =)

Question Two; This question was deliberately ambiguous so that it would encourage the readers to interpret it in thier own way therefore gaining more personal results as the people asked were all of different ages, cultures backgrounds etc.

” What do you think this says about your satisfaction with consumer standards?”

Results:

• I don’t think any of this is an indicator, but your question has made me think a lot about it over the last couple of weeks.
• Ermmm….Actually nothing,according to what my consumers showed me.
  If that was really my job people would ask me to make them things,pay me and show satisfaction or any other feelings so I can feel like I have done something good.That’s just because I’m not asking for money for what I do + the only one’s I’ve made stuff are my friends.
  But overall I think that consumers(generally) would like stuff simple,nice and at the cost I make them.
• – now we have products on the market that are planned for last alots of years … and end up not to justify its price.
  because they will be outdated and probably there is another product to replace him … we are in the era of super development / consumerism …
  then why not create products that have a relative lower quality but at the same time enabling the reciclagen to create most updated and innovative products … and that leads consumers to resume the old, reducing the risk of pollution, and the need to use the raw materials sometimes missing.
  do you enderstand my point of view?…
• it says that the standards are pretty low and that is why i change programs
• Part of what drives me is that so often I see fellow consumers of a product clamoring for some new feature or application of the device, but rarely do I see a company that gives us exactly what we want. If we can fiddle with things and bend them to our designs, we can make devices much more personal and more of a reflection of what we’ve come to want them to be.
  
• I think a lot of the time people have expectations for things they buy that may not be entirely realistic or logical, or may be more than the producers are willing to give. Especially with video game systems – lots of people want so badly to create their own content (especially in the “web 2.0″ generation) but the standard industry policy is to lock everything down unless someone is willing to shell out the big money for it.
• I don’t really think it has anything to do with my dissatisfaction with the products themselves. Just my curiosity to see what’s inside.
• Consumer standards…bit of problem understanding that… I don’t know how me making music and 1 or 2 animations is connected to my consumer standards… I just have fun making things.
  
• I think that companies should make products easier to change and modify.
  
• This is a homemade project.
  If I had 20K usd I would just buy one and not make one.
• it wasn’t about consumer standards, i just needed a very specific input device that most people didn’t need. the comsumer product is fine for 99.9% of people.
• Nothing
• So, basically, what I’m trying to say is “standards be damned – I’ll make it my own.”

Question Three :

“How do you feel about these objects once you                                                                                                                              have finished making them or after you have had your creative input?”

Results:

• I feel very happy when I finish one of them, And the person who gets it loves it even more then me.
• I feel a greater understanding for them and possibly appreciate the design more but the modified item is generally almost completely different from the original item as I am a builder not a hacker as such.
• it does need more work to get good parts out of it. mostly with the powder. that’s something that I’ll keep working on it on my spare time.
• After modding products it gives you the sense of creativity and pride (like after you finish building a model of something)
• I don’t know again what you mean by objects:( If you help me understand, I’ll answer as best I can:)
• I’m usually pretty happy with what I have come up with in the end.
• im actually quite proud of them
• when i create/mod/hack something..i fell glad i made it, if it what i need…
  but sometimes i dont like it and end up to wait for better produts on market, or try to buy one more or less as i need…
• I feel satisfied.Especially 2 years ago that I was only modding/hacking/making.
  Now I’m not really into the modding stuff and etc.I got bored of it though I still like it just because I have a life,meaning that I go out,have fun with friends and enjoy my life as it is.I no longer have this need and feeling to customize my electronics and that’s because I do like them the way they are.I’ll only touch my soldering iron when something breaks or really needs customization.I’m still modding and doing this kind of stuff but not all the time.
• I’m just satisfied when they actually work.

Quite interesting, am sure they can be involved somewhere.

sue teller – encouraging people to do new things, “people are not being creative when people are doing something the same way it was done before and getting the same results.” — Ricky Szeto

trying to work out the order in this web, as in some kind of structure for these ideas to be presented

a possible title?

The individuals urge to create and innovate -

An unhealthy interest for the world of passive consumerism?

‘individual creativity in the face of standardisation’ and ‘the effect that passive consumerism is having on the relationships people have with there belongings’.

since we last spoke (with some extra bits and minor changes):

I have gathered a lot of information and done a lot of research into the differences between the outsider and the passive consumer, the home maker and the market designer; and as a result of this it has become clear that there is a huge amount of debate and a lot to talk about in relation to ‘individual creativity in the face of standardisation’ and ‘the effect that passive consumerism is having on the relationships people have with there belongings’. Talking about the urge not just to create their own but to adapt existing mass produced products to suit the individual, something being adapted to do something that its original maker did not intend but that suits the users needs more exaclty. . This is where the mass designers have failed and the individuals creative innovation comes on board. This brings up arkhipovs objects like light bulb sockets being transformed into versatile power sockets, this is illegal, Quite commonly people seem to develop much more emotional relationships with their belongings by customising and personalising them. Emotional/ pschological side effects

- i saw a talk titled “creativity and consumerism ” by Beth Kolko which touched on this issue of what is allowed to be adapted and what is forbidden in the realm of technology, hacking, its illegal to create your own application and put it on an iphone or make a homebrew game for a psp, this is the extreme end of the spektrum where consumerism isnt just weigning down creative acts by making it easy to buy a new chair rather than fix the existing one or make a whole new one, but these laws actually actively stamp down on these highly skilled and creative/ innovative minds, it gets to the strange and intimidating stage where “buying something no longer means outright ownership.” (beth kolko)

There is a deliberate activism in a lot of these creations and customistations; activism against standardisation, capitalism, passive consumerism and general mass control. So these people are the intentional outsiders.

A theory (from a film mentioned in the same talk), the idea that one day soon everything willl have these signs and stickers all over it saying “NO USER SERVICABLE PARTS”, this is certainly going to take a toll on creativity throughout society, not just disallowing adaption of personal objects but actually stopping the user from maintaining their own things. In comparison to this the home made solutions of Akhipovs characters and generally looking at the way things worked not so long ago; this is clearly just madness.

“Innovation can only come with expertise”
-WHO ACTUALLY BELEIVES THAT?
People arent having trust put into there creative ability, is this a deliberate capitalist act? Its made out to be very attractive to pay someone else to do it. People maybe forget the feeling they get from creative acts as they are so rare in so many lifes now. (pre made pasta sauces, set out kitchen formations).

“i know that every day hundreds of millionsof people discover their connection with god in some way when they create” – Vladimir the mace

I also like the idea of this urge to adapt and individualise things, in china there is a huge craze of decorating phones, graffiti writers write their name on places making this place very meaningfull to them, people everywhere seem to have this urge expressed somewhere in their lives, the urge to make things meaningfull through creativity. Mass customisation.
Personnally as an example; i felt so much more of a connection and a love for my new bike once i had taken it apart bit by bit and then put it back together, in the end of the day this is just pschological understanding and almost a false sense that i made it myself- psychologically; if you were to drink every pint of your life out of the same standard, un personalised, mass produced pint glass you would without a doubt gain a really quite emotional attachment to this glass.

(reading “emotional design” by donald a norman)

SO, in terms of consumerism and creativity i can discuss the ways in which consumerism is taking its toll on creativity and putting an end to intimate relationships with objects:
- ease and value of purchasing replacements and new attractive products
- laws and fear spreading/ intimidating directions stopping people from being creative/ innovative and making people doubt their ability
- standardisation, the loss of the individual/ personality
- disposability, new new new
- people just dont make it/ do it themselves anymore because they dont have to, their is a service for everything

also i can talk about how people are both consciously and subconsciously reacting oppositionally to this and showing a dissatisfaction with the standard, controlled and massed up way things are going,
the concept of the outsider is definately still core to this all as they are the one that escapes this in any way they can, some dont realise they are and some do, some just have this uncontrollable urge to use their hands to apply creative thought rather than press one after the tone for directions on how to complete level three without losing any gamerpoints,

pointing – with withered fingers

rightio,

found the arkhipov book in waterstones, t’was 20 pounds but worth it as its not in any library it seems, a really interesting collection of home made inventions and other ‘folk artifacts’.

In relation to this: i have now started focussing in on the idea that consumerism has wiped out social creativity and independant judgement of design. Talking about outsider artists and ‘normal’ people that have created wonderfull things as a result of being out the consumer loops, nearly all the outsider artists i have discovered have this in common, they avoid a consumerist life or simply reject social norms and standards. Also talk about the amazing inevntions people come up with when they are forced to as they cant simply buy there solution, maybe everyone would be better off if they had to problem solve their way to the wine tasting. Can also bring in and talk about design fascism and the effects of unquestionable elitest desgners into this. The undoubtably brilliant product, the balance of self sufficiency, the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’, (whats in it)  and the other forces affecting creative outlets.

 so what do you think about this slightly more concentrated collection of thoughts and their direction?

paper face

well,… i have now discovered some really interesting characters that actually seem relevant to this march, firstly – a man called ferdinand cheval who was a completly uneducated postman in a small village in france in 1879, he had to go on crazy missions on foot that took days to deliver each letter, he slept in barns and had visions, one day he tripped over a stone and looked at it amazed by its beauty, he put it in his pocket and took it home where he began from that day, at the age of 43 to build the most wild ppppppalace for himself, he did it all on his own with no previous knowledge of art or masonary, it took twenty years, its absolutly amazing, considering the context its more impresive than gaudis park in barcelona i would say, he was seen as the village idiot but his creation is now regognised and protected as a work of highly skilled design, also there is a man called ernest pignon-ernest who is not quite so eccentric and more of a straight up artist, but he seems to be one of the first conceptual street artists, he began working in the seventies painting really quite dark and disturbing images and then pasting them on streets, he definatley broke a loop and had a direct untainted, perhaps unwanted effect on the public/ his audience, this could bring up quite an interesting discussion about the positive outcomes of controlling design and preventing any old outsider from getting on the stage and expresing their ability, design fascism.

found a book about designs that were made by “normal people” in the desperation of soveit russia, its called “homemade” and is by vladimir arkhipov, it includes sustainable designs like door mats made from bottle caps and bath tub plugs made from carefully carved shoe soles, kind of relating to survival through design imagination. they do it to survive, why do we do it? to stimulate? also trying to get hold of “design as art” by bruno munari (which you mentioned chris), it seems bruno beleives that design should be BEAUTIFULL, approachable and functional, really am a bit lost for which points i’m working towards but dont actually really feel that lost, just need to simmer on it i think,

main points:

primary- the outsider/ the normal person, design fascism, street art, loops and standards (even within this apparantly boundless arena called street art)

secondlyrary – what makes successful design? is it about the designer fulfilling his own aims? stimulating? functional in the users hands? pretty sure its all these? thats all been discussed far to much anyway, i aim to be a farmer not a landscape architect, i aim to be… unkonwn

intrestingly- design as art and commen civilian problem solving as design,

and- celebrity designers, popular labels/ designers occasionally selling riduculously shit products that are lapped up by habbitual consumer whores,

user centered work,

reading list:

“home-made” – vladimir arkhipov,

“emotional design” – Donald A Norman,

“design as art” – Bruno Munari,

“a book of surrealist games” – Alastair Brotchi,