Howdy,
Today was our second introduction to the ‘Surprise Me’ module. Theo and Steve basically re-affirmed the concept for our project and gave some interesting examples of surrealism. Surrealism isn’t an area I have much knowledge in, so it was interesting to learn more about it. The idea of surrealism and its dream like perversions of reality are quite bizarre and I have to admit, in my opinion, they were quite surprising. Although surrealism seems to follow a more artistic route, I do find it to be quite amusing and I think it would be interesting to explore its use within design, though I don’t quite know how one would achieve such…
When we moved on to surrealist games, I was brought more delight due to absurdity of the humour and the lack of any sense with regards to their structure and rules. We were told to create a new surrealist game which I found to be quite entertaining. My favourite surrealist game was definitely the game of ‘creating superstitions’ which links to the last lecture’s talk about Gettier about creating beliefs with justifications – essentially superstitions.
As our task was to create something surprising, I have been thinking about a few ideas, but I’m unsure what kind of projects I want to do, or even what I should be doing. At the end of the lecture I discussed the matter with Theo. I told Theo how I was unsure about what I should be doing and where to go with my project. He gave me a few ideas such as human augmentation. He told me that we should be trying to surprise them by doing something that would be surprising for a product designer to do, whether that was doing something completely opposite to which my practise does such as painting or by doing something I normally would do, but in a surprising way.
This has given me a lot to think about and I am still a little unsure about exactly what to do, but I think if I toss around a few ideas, hopefully something will click and give me a starting point.