Group Reflection

One of our goals was to focus on transforming memories into something new and creating positive associations where before there were only negative ones. From this standpoint our critiques found our ritual compelling, plausible, and likely to be effective at doing just that. We believe the foundational concept of our design is successful.

From the feedback we received and our own discussions, there are a few areas in which we could have gone further with the design. First, the idea of making this a longer, durational process would help to address the question above about speed of rehabilitation, and make the process and eventual artwork more meaningful and thus hopefully more therapeutic. Printing one transformed image a day for a month would be one way to slow down the process and make it more formal. There might even be specific instructions for what to think about on each day, as you travel further down the road of letting go.

Second, we would like to finesse the printer itself a little further. The question was raised whether the special printer is actually necessary to the therapeutic ritual, or if the intention of the ritual could be accomplished without it, as simply software that you could use to transform the sound waves (or other data from other artifacts) and print anywhere. We are still interested in the idea of a physical object especially for this purpose, so that you see the transformation occurring physically and not just digitally, but we can definitely get more specific with how this occurs. Some great suggestions that were offered include a printer that is more like a plotter and would allow you to see each image being constructed gradually, in a more transparent and more visceral way. Another was to add a light box so that the deformations are more easily seen each time they are printed.

Finally, it would be helpful to make a firm decision about context: is this kit designed for home use or as a professional therapist's tool? This would affect packaging and level of detail in the instructional brochure.