Reflections on exploratory studies

I aimed to demonstrate that it is possible to utilise contemporary jewellery practice to develop the idea that digital objects could be conceived as personally meaningful objects;

things that fit into people’s relationships with one another and echo aspects of someone’s personal biography. To achieve this my approach has been to learn elements of what is dear and emotionally significant to someone and to build an idea of digital jewellery that is sensitive to these shared fragments. This involved a new perspective through which the aim was to create firstly an environment of familiarity through the object; something that reflected a participant’s shared criteria for meaning and beauty, and secondly a digital object that had no defined function. Any function was unprescribed and ambiguous. The aim was not to translate existing modes of digital object, into digital jewellery, but to create objects which enabled interactions that would be significant to the participant, and of interest to a wider audience, in a far less prescribed way than the common conventions of current digital objects allow (see Chapter 3 The gadget sections 3.1 & 3.3).

I have identified several qualities of contemporary jewellery practice and craft practice in general that facilitate such an approach (see Chapter 4 section 4.4 Beauty, enchantment and empathy). These exploratory studies have been a process of empathising with an individual, being sensitive to their criteria for beauty and an awareness of the potential for enchantment through the final pieces. The studies have not been an exercise in emulating someone’s aesthetic taste; I know from consideration of my own belongings that in some cases I find them beautiful despite the aesthetics. Instead I love them because of the symbolism and meanings they represent for me personally. Rather, I have tried to gain a feel for someone through the shared stories and objects and to make something inspired by this information.

My choice to involve both jewellers and designers of mobile digital devices as participants was in the aim of escaping layperson conceptions of both jewellery (possible by working with contemporary jewellers) and digital devices (possible by working with designers of such objects and technologies). By surmounting the hurdles that a narrow conception of either jewellery or digital devices can bring I hoped to be able to have a quality of

conversations with these experts that would be rich, building on their knowledge of the developments of both kinds of objects (jewellery and digital devices). I acknowledge however that by engaging with experts they would already have opinions of the developments occurring in their fields and possibly also have agendas regarding this also.

It is important to discuss my influence on the participants at this stage and the responses they gave. I tried to give the same information to each participant and I purposefully sought to say as little as I could concerning what I was aiming to learn from each of them in an attempt to have as little influence as possible. At times throughout the stimuli process, and the process that followed where I gave the pieces to the participants, I did feel this to be an unnatural distance to have when engaging with someone, but it did enable me to gain their responses without my influence.

My idea to use film arose from the need to communicate the digital aspect of the pieces to the participant and wider audience. However, film soon became much more than this for me. It became my way of telling a story, fusing together elements of the cultural, technological and physical dynamics of the piece as well as creative ideas and fantasy. In illustrating the digital potential of the proposals I sought to present these dynamics clearly, whilst leaving the interpretation and personal appropriation open to the viewer. I was completely open to a participant wearing the objects in their own way and similarly finding a personal appropriation or interpretation of the pieces.

The objects and film in all three cases acted together as the whole pieces. The presence of the films meant that to a great degree the pieces did not need to work, the story and interaction potential were offered through film rather than in a practically realised sense.

Film enabled me to illustrate my creative ideas of the interaction potential to a piece. Also in some cases the films facilitated a visualisation of the digital elements that would not have been easily achievable in reality or real time; for example the visualisation of rain falling in Cyprus while the jewellery piece blossomed open in the UK, or showing the blossoming of the piece to a wider audience if it only blossomed once. Similarly in other cases experiencing the interaction would take an indeterminate length of time, for example

in Sometimes… where the digital interactions only occur rarely or the time it would have taken for the rain sensor to detect a certain amount of rainfall for Blossom.

The films were vehicles to tell these open-ended stories to the participants and also to a wider audience. Dunne (1999) detailed his opinions concerning the use of non-digitally realised objects acting as proposals for digital objects stating that

“They challenge the impossibility of the possible…Through use, or at least by modelling a scenario of use in the mind, the observer discovers new ways of conceptualising reality.” (Dunne, 1999: 56)

Dunne argued that when objects are imagined to have digital interaction potential rather than actually having these abilities the viewer has to imagine for his or herself the consequence, role and value of the proposed ideas and in doing this they extend the initial proposal through their own imagination, rather than viewing the objects as final ideas.

As Boorstin (1990) and McCarthy and Wright (2004) maintain, part of the conventions of watching films is to identify with characters or to imagine oneself in the different stories and scenarios playing out. I aimed to exploit this notion of perspective taking in the films I made to accompany the jewellery objects. The films also offered a richer context for the pieces and for an audience to view than would be possible in a conventional gallery setting.

Dunne (1999) also argued that digital prototypes presented in a gallery rarely challenge viewer’s perceptions and assumptions about the role of objects in their lives. He cited a gallery based working-prototype exhibition of his own work Monitor as Material, 1996 as such a case. The audience firstly failed to reflect on the “fictive, social and aesthetic”

(Dunne 1999: 69) aspects of the piece of work, which link it to everyday life, and viewed it instead as a dislocated gallery installation and spectacle. The second point to note here was that the dynamic of the gallery engendered a situation that invited an audience to “marvel at the ingenuity of the designer” (Dunne 1999: 69) and the electronic functioning of the object, rather than to consider possible the role of the pieces to a viewer personally. Film offered a different way to present jewellery in a more dynamic and contextualised manner than static image or gallery settings allow.

This chapter has detailed the practical component of this research involving individual participants. The rationale behind these individual exploratory studies centred on the use of contemporary jewellery practice as a direct social activity and means of developing proposals for digital jewellery. Engagement with individual participants was an intimate dialogue between me and a participant that allowed for the consideration of digital jewellery as intimate, personally emotionally significant objects. In this context the studies have enabled me to open up my practice to engage directly with themes and experiences within personal biographies that were emotionally meaningful for someone. The resulting proposals of digital jewellery were not utopian propositions, but open-ended proposals that invited critical feedback, reflection and re-interpretation. My approach enabled direct feedback from the individuals to the proposals made, offering a level of inter-subjective response to the ideas I had developed, which in turn informed my own developing perspectives of the potential and value of digital jewellery. This aspect of the project is explored in the following chapter, which details the responses from Faith, Emma and Ana to the digital jewellery proposals.

6 The participants’ responses to the digital jewellery