Context

As mentioned before, one of the leading inspirations for my piece was James Pierce’s Obscura 1C. This piece is sort of a crude yet elegant looking camera that functions just like an ordinary one except that it requires you breaking it to see the photos you took. It’s evident from the look of the camera that it required a good bit of care and intention to design and manufacture, yet it doesn’t function nearly as well as ordinary cameras. I found the sort of paradoxical nature of placing a lot of care and intent into something that is crude and unproductive to be a very interesting contrast that had a big influence on my work.

I also took inspiration from the ideas my classmates shared during the What If exercise in class. Most especially, Sarah Kwok’s pose of “What if technology had agency and that it could choose whether or not to perform its intended function, depending on its mood or feelings?” I found this to be a super interesting narrative that I wanted to work with during this investigation.

Another source I took inspiration from is James Pierce’s and Eric Paulos’s paper titled: “Counterfunctional Things: Exploring Possibilities in Designing Digital Limitations.” It presented to me the idea of a “counterfunctional” thing, or, “a thing that figuratively counters some of its own functionality.” (Pierce et al par. 1).