Thursday 30th September, 2015
In our first seminar, the topic of genealogy was being discussed by looking into the different arts that are effected by it or at the least involved within it. In the beginning of the seminar we were given the idea of using a family tree to better understand the premise of genealogy, and then told to turn it upside down - this is to give us the impression of how an idea is formed from many branches rather than several ideas coming from a preset idea, this way it would open up more paths and traits to discover.
After discussing how different art types had been modernized and how each of the old arts now has a link to a technologically based art - we were given a task. This task was something that we could choose from, we were given several different examples to pick from and then we had to generate ideas in response to the problem - some of them being; What if dinosaurs came back to life? What if it snowed all winter? What is talking was unhygienic? and some others.
Our group decided to work with the idea of; What if talking was unhygienic?
So for the first idea we came up with several design ideas - some of which rather dystopian in some senses because of their nature. Either way, the first idea was to use a "Human Collar" that would be worn everyday by every person as to monitor your use of language and to make sure it wasn't considered dirty/vulgar, hence being classed as unhygienic. For each time you swore the collar would give you a small shock, and every collar has a limit to how much it can shock you before it shuts down your ability to speak all together. Once this limit was reached you would have to go and use a specific facility to get back your ability to speak, this facility being called the "Word Toilet" - this is the only place of which you were able to 'empty' the collar for its use again, hopefully giving people more of an incentive to pick a better vocabulary.
