.002 Seashells and Talking Spoons

DisCourse in the GUT

We've been trying to get the undergrads at our university to talk to each other. Their time is short. They're stressed. They don't usually accept invitations to constructive, facilitated conversations especially when they're handed out by university staff. So we did some special backflips in set design to grab their attention for a couple hours of chat.

DisCourse was a dinner theatre project. With some permission, the basement of our building became a made-up archive called the GUT. We wrote a script for the Hosts and blasted out emails with vague invites, GPS coordinates, and a meeting time. Recipients who RSVP'd were asked to bring an item of their choosing as payment for dinner.

On arrival, guests had to scavenge the basement for a lost object (like a spoon) and listen to it. The donor had left their voice in the onboard SD card, sometimes telling a story about the object or their impressions of the previous dinner that they had attended themself. The new guests would begin their own conversations based on what they heard. From there, the rest of the meal unfolded with spontaneous facilitation by the host and other physical elements in the space.

The host guided towards curiosity and away from problem sets. The students talked about love and their parents. They asked strangers(ish) across the table, "what do you mean by that?" They talked about belonging and not. Some of them liked it. Some of them didn't. Some of them tried to climb a ladder that was not a part of the set. It seemed like it went well. When it ended, they entered the freight elevator and teleported back into the decentralized mist of the campus.

Motivating

The hardware prototypes are not very complicated but they didn't move forward for a long time. I'd originally pitched the concept 6 months before we thought of DisCourse. The idea was for people to find seashells around campus, hold them to their ear, and hear someone else's voice. Maybe they could leave their own. I still haven't gotten that far yet.

I got lucky that Cassie, the designer of DisCourse, knew I'd been trying to get seashells to exist since October. She wrote them into the script. My boss encouraged me to block dedicated time for it. Maybe it took a total of 25-30 hours? It wasn't that long but having priority come from someone else made it move in a way that I hadn't been able to.

The functionality is still barebones MVP compared to the original vision. I need to start pushing the boundaries of what I already know how to do to make that progress which is harder and takes more time.

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Read

Back to the Rectory by Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books (Priestdaddy fans, tune in)

How to Read a Book: The X-Ray Method by Scott A. Sandage by way of Shannon Mattern's are.na channel: On Theory and How to Read It

How AI Can Help Tackle Collective Decision Making by Mathis Bitton and Elizabeth Haas in the Harvard Business Review - this goes over MIT Media Lab's City Science group's pilot of their CityScope prototype

In progress

moving !!

bird story edits (round 2)

Srat plotting

Stein On Writing by Sol Stein

Procrastinating

Listing a cactus themed cat tree on FB marketplace