This project focus on the people’s responsiveness in a specific environment. The first thing came up in our mind is “wall” and magnets. Magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls or pushes another magnet.

Then we began with the initial brain storm to list the things that came up in our mind related to “wall”:

• Déjà vu: Human interaction with their own past life.
• Object, a behavior and its surroundings: Compare them or combine them.
• Politics and how the affect us: There’s a wall that is going to be built and will divide two countries. If we combine this with a Déjà vu = Berlin wall. It happened after the WWII.
• Relationships and patterns of communication. Repetitive patterns between people.
• LGBT community.
• The great firewall the internet wall.
• Boundaries between human and non-human.

After we discussed topic by topic, we decided to build an interactive wall and list some questions to move forward:

• Walls like Berlin wall and The great firewall mean division, isolation, prohibition.
• The reasons that make walls built is: politics to avoid invasion, cut connection, achieve imprisonment or etc.
• What issues we care about: the human right, surveillance, internet(or digital) environment, profits, energy, control power.
• Question:
  • What if the wall can break the normal walls meaning, act as an media to connect each other?
  • What if the power cannot separate people by building a wall?
  • What if the magnetic power can be used to connect?
  • How does people feel after they were separate from people they love for a long time? How does he/she feel after reconnect with his/her love after a long period separation?

domain map

First, we tried the first prototype of our tools that let people can connect with others. We believe that the power of touching is touching. So we made this glove with transparent material and sewed the magnet. When one feels the pulling power from the other side of a wall, there may be something happens or some different feelings in their mind. We test this pair of gloves with different thicks of walls and materials.

At the same time, we were inspired by the project “Line of breath” by Isabella Cruz, a sound installation on the Mexico/United State political fence. When people get close to the wall, they can hear a voice of breath. For myself, I interpreted it as “give a space to breath to those who are suffered from rejection, discrimination and inequality”.

So we began to think about how we make an immersive environment that let people feel the pain from isolation or separation, have desire to connect with others, then our story was born.

In our dystopian world, since the land is monopolized by government, people have to live in the air with single floating room. This world  is driven by an energy transformed from digital data that generated by using the internet. Since the internet service is so developed that people immersed in digital world and rarely go outside to have physical contact with others.  The government take advantage of this phenomena and aims at profits that provided by people. They imprison people in their own house. When people find they are isolated and controlled by the government, it’s too late and after a long time working on generating data through years, they are hopeless. A female who cannot bear this situation comes up an idea that use magnetic power to connect with each other. She plans to sacrifice herself to have the last physical connection with others by sending her idea on social media to call people taking action.

Through this story, we want to satire the obsession to digital world in current society.

Having this narrative story, we began to build our second prototype – tow rooms divided by a wall. According to the test we did with gloves, we used the glass wall in our class room, cover it with black curtain, as our interface and built two closed space with cabinets and curtains for users.

We pinned the glove in each space, leaved the message “find the other side” on the wall to let people use gloves finding another user in the other side.

We also created an account on Instagram to display the character’s message – a video recording her typing. We want user search this account with their phones and watch the video to know more about our dystopian world.

But at last, we dropped this part because to some degree, it confused users by connecting “find the other side” with use social media searching our digital avatar on Instagram in the first round user test. We learnt that when conduct the user test, make process as direct or simple as possible is a better way,  providing a more effective way to experience. After we iterated it, we record the following video of our user test.

We found that it’s not so easy to find another user even though our interface(the glass wall) is not so broad. Some users felt hopeless after a long time searching. But when they really feel the magnetic power, some of them says “wow! wow! ” . Most of them were surprised and felt amazing during this test.

At last, we hope that people can be aware of current digital situation and go back to physical contact with each other to some degree. Modern life is not a digital life.