Brief
Explaining the nature of consciousness is one of the most important and perplexing areas of philosophy, but the concept is notoriously ambiguous. When we explore more about the human's consciousness, we may know more about the possibility of user experience design, besides, we can know about where in the brain thoughts might arise. For this project, we used artefact analysis and directed storytelling to collect and select the concerned information of consciousness.
Inspiration
I was interested in the Anton-Babinski syndrome, which is a condition in which patients deny vision loss despite objective evidence. Patients with Anton Syndrome are often found describing people or surroundings that are not present, or walking into objects, though the patient will continue to deny that they cannot see. This kind of neurological condition makes the patient have a mass of their consciousness. I thought it was a good point to learn about the consciousness of patients who have a neurological condition and it can be compared with some normal people.
Picture: Zoe Yan
Source: Atlas of Emotions
My other team members also put forward divers proposals on perfume, LSD and horror movies. In terms of LSD, it is a chemical hallucinogen and people usually take it to feel the stimulation. For most people, the world appears distorted when they take LSD. Colours, sounds, objects and even time can all seem very strange and disturbing. In my opinion, exploring the changes in human consciousness after they take the drug is also an interesting point for us to do research. Another proposal is about a horror movie, this is because thrillers usually use props, scenes, and sound effects to create fear. Fear is an essential part of human emotion and people often have empathy for what they fear about.
storytelling & artefact analysis
We found that we have no experience with LSD drugs or anaesthesia, but we all have our own fears, so after our group discussion, we decide to pay attention to the consciousness of fear topic. We did story-telling in our campus, we randomly interviewed ten people of different ages and let them share their frightening things as well as the story behind that. We've collected a lot of unexpected answers, and sometimes they are the things that people don't care about, such as the seed of tomato.
Picture & Audio: Zoe Yan
We made six personas and it included some keywords of interviewees' story. From the keywords, we found the common point of the reason that they feel fear: Feeling of Irritation; Living Organism; Unexpected possibilities. It is undeniable that people feel scared when they saw something disgusting due to their physiological reaction and sometime they may feel fear about the unexpected possibilities, such as darkness as well as shadows.
We realized that there are two aspects of fear: conscious fear and non-conscious fear. The conscious fear is basically the feeling of being afraid and non-conscious fear is the defensive response. Some of our stories depict conscious fear such as fear of tomatoes and beans, where the person is totally aware of the object they fear and are afraid of touching, biting or even looking someone else eating it. And the other aspect of fear is the non-conscious fear, here people told us stories such as they have fear of the sudden darkness or sudden appearance of an insect or a living organism. This fear is because of the element of surprise.
Picture: Zoe Yan
In terms of artefact analysis, We focused on artefacts that are related to the stories or the findings and we analysed 3 artefacts and these are the worksheets. We looked at material and social qualities, interactive and historical aspects and also the location of them. we selected the oldest horror movie: The House of the Devil" by Georges Méliès. It is a silent black&white film, which depicts an encounter with a devil inside a castle. The story was taken from gothic literature. It’s only 3min long and is blurred. It was released in 1896 in a theatre in Paris but was finally discovered in 1988 – nearly one hundred years after the movie was first produced. It is one of the very first movies—to deliberately use special effects to frighten its viewers.
And the second artefact is the knife which has often been used in people's ordinary life as a cutting tool and also can be used as a weapon. It's hilt usually made of plastic and the main part made of metal. Besides, it's edge is extremely sharp that it may hurt people sometimes. In the Bronze Age, the first knife made by humans was a double edged dagger.
The final artefact is the tomato, which has a red colour and squishy texture. Sometimes people may feel uncomfortable when they see the slimy tomato seeds. It originated in America and move to Europe in the 16th century, however, British people thought it was poisonous and they felt afraid to try it. It's affordance changed over time, for example, it can be eaten as a fruit in previous age and also can be used as a sauce nowadays, which served with chips.
Source: Google
Futher ideation
Picture: Zoe Yan; Winnie; Nyla
When we learn more about fear and consciousness, we find that fear usually arises from people's imagination about the unknown things, so we imagined fear as a dot that represents the unknown and we also used it in our animation video.
storyline
Drawing: Zoe
final design
.We divided our final presentation into three stages: 1. Fear in the classroom 2.Horrible experiences we've had 3. Exploring Fear Game. In the first stage, we used a flashlight as well as sound to trigger curiosity. People may wonder where is the dot when they hear the Dynamique noise. After that, the second stage used horror animation, which is based on people's life experience to make the audience can easily imagine feeling the same way themselves. In the final part, we designed a "Fear Game". This game used the countdown and ballooning parts to cause anxiety. To be more specific, we pre-programmed a number as the explosion number, but the audience did not know that and they need to have their own number. When someone's number is the same as explosion number, he/she need to carry a balloon that may burst at any time.
Storyboard: Nyla
In the presentation, we want to provide a sense of suspense or mystery, terror, shock, or fear through the fear game as well as the animation. Besides, creating a cultural or personal connection, tapping into an inbuilt fear is also what we want to achieve. For us, we are willing to take the red dot as the first perspective to explain why people get frightened in some situations.
We want to encourage people to accept "Fear" and know more about what makes them feel fear as well as how fear works. Some studies have shown that the universal trigger for fear is the threat of harm, real or imagined. This threat can be for our physical, emotional or psychological well-being. When we sense danger, the brain reacts instantly, sending signals that activate the nervous system. This causes physical responses, such as a faster heartbeat, rapid breathing. This response is known as "fight or flight" because that is exactly what the body is preparing itself to do: fight off the danger or run fast to getaway. The body stays in this state of fight-flight until the brain receives an "all clear" message and turns off the response.
We want to show that fears controls our mind and confuses what we imagine from what is real. Although there are certain things that trigger fear in most of us, we still can learn to face our fear.
reflection
The main reason that we chose to study the consciousness of fear is that we think it is a common human emotion feeling, and viewers will be more empathetic after watching our design. However, we didn't get all of our classmates involved in our games and make them feel scared in our final "Fear Game". I think creating a completely immersive experience may help us to express "Fear" better. In the final session, we should explain and summarize how fear emotion generates instead of rushing to the end of our presentation after the game.