Brief: To design an experience that explores the nature of consciousness.
Group: Erick, Lea, Jason, Tanvi
What is consciousness? How does our consciousness differ from somebody else’s? Is it just awareness of the mind? We decided to explore the interlinked relation between the consciousness of the mind and that of the body. We chose to focus on dreaming and the state of dissonance where the mind is fully conscious to the inner world of dreams. This phenomenon is called ‘Lucid dreaming’.
The research methods for this project were — Artefact analysis and Storytelling.
Artefact Analysis
People usually experience lucid dreaming in the state of deep sleep. We decided to explore and analyse the environment where people experience this, which is mostly; the bedroom. Our analysis was conducted by gathering a few objects and dividing them according to how they affect one’s consciousness while sleeping.
These categories were-
Control of temperature — Fan, AC, heater, Thermostat, Windows, etc.
Control of Light — Curtains, Lamps, LED, Eye mask,
Control of Comfort — Pillows, bedsheet, mattress.
Routine — Laptop, phone, medicine, books.
We marked down the cultural, material, and interactive aspects of these artefacts.We understood how a person can go into the state of lucid dreaming with the help of these artefacts.
We also tried analysing the artefacts which appear in one’s dream. Sometimes, the objects which surround people in their daily life can be a part of their dream. While lucid dreaming, these objects can change to be almost surrealistic.
From the storytelling, we noted down certain objects which appear to be normal at first, and then when they start thinking about the object, they become surreal. This approach gave us the necessary design opportunity we needed.
Storytelling
We decided to conduct a free flowing system to interview people. We were more interested in knowing their stories so we thought of not having a script. We spoke to over 20 people and asked them to describe their stories about lucid dreaming. Some people also spoke about sleep walking, which was an interesting co-relation between the consciousness of the mind and the body.
For our intermediate presentation, we also did a bit of body storming.
Below is an example of the storytelling collection:
One of the really interesting things we procured from the interviews was that, even in dreams, there is a subconscious and a conscious. The brain only controls the conscious part and when you think about a certain object, that object shifts from the subconscious to the conscious.
Final outcome
We decided to go ahead with this as our concept and create an experience where people can see the relation between how things shift from the subconscious to the conscious, all while in the inner world of dreams.
We tried creating this experience by building two rooms. One would be the subconscious. And the other would be the conscious room. We made the conscious room in a surrealistic way so that people can understand that that is the part which the brain controls.
The basic concept was to stage a narrative of a dream and let a participant be in the conscious room and call for objects from the subconscious room. The narrative we thought of was a killer who is trying to kill you in a kitchen setting. The participant had to be innovative and think of objects from the subconscious room to try and defend themselves. The objects in the subconscious were knife, plates, scissors, Fork, ladles, etc. All these look pretty normal. When the participant calls them to the conscious room though, their brain has already changed the objects and controlled it.
So the fork becomes a pitch fork, and the plate becomes a shield. We tried to make it into a performance art and tried to let more than one volunteer participate. This was the part where our artefact analysis came in quite handy.
Feedback and take aways
Overall, our peers had good comments about the project. They liked the fact that the explanation of lucid dreaming was so innovative and that people who have not even experienced it once got to experience it.
The take away from this project would be that I figured out how to relate the research methods correctly to our ideas, which I was struggling with in the last few projects.
Bibliography
Gackenbach, J. and LaBarge, S. eds., 2012. Conscious mind, sleeping brain: Perspectives on lucid dreaming. Springer Science & Business Media.
Ter Meulen, B.C., Tavy, D. and Jacobs, B.C., 2009. From stroboscope to dream machine: a history of flicker-induced hallucinations. European neurology, 62(5), pp.316–320.Hobson, J.A., 2009. The neurobiology of consciousness: Lucid dreaming wakes up. International Journal of Dream Research, 2(2), pp.41–44.
Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin, I. and Hobson, A.J., 2009. Lucid dreaming: a state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep, 32(9), pp.1191–1200.
Comentários