_Circles&Props

Some areas of this paper seemed to me too heavily focus on its experimental practices and not enough on the outcome. The theory behind these practices do still lead to some interesting & thought provoking subjects. I found it interesting to see how they thought providing an underlying set of "strict rules" as suggested by Caillois's characteristics for games would provide us with a beneficial template for a more natural creation of products, as the concepts seems self-contradicting.

One of my favorite subjects to be presented in this article is "the decisive moment" concept, especially when being applied to music performances. The indescribable feeling of the seamless transitional state in which musicians go through when preforming is a subject area which I found most interesting within this paper. I also like the preceding section which talks about the 'divorce of the hands from the head', the trance like feeling of talking whilst completing the current task at hand. I have myself experienced this with divided attentions between speech and action often interfering with each other in an unusual way.

One of subject pieces that I have the biggest criticism over is the 'estrangement switches' . I think that trying to intentional set the participants pattern of thought onto a set path goes completely against the opening quote ("How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you") if you are directly applying it to a body part to which many products already exist & will likely influence your design in a subconscious way. This is most prevalent in the picture of the "mastication Amplifier" which from a design point of view looks like a pair of headphones.

I feel that this projects practical could either be improved or advanced by switching over to a system which is less limiting, specifically with the materials provided.