IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

64 Chapter 3
were inspired by the social science of proxemics, which looks at how different
spatial relationships—standing close, standing apart, eavesdropping—
change the tenor of the ways we communicate. Dunne and Raby asked
themselves, why should videoconferencing always be face to face? and
developed alternative scenarios. Dunne and Raby asked, why limit contact
to speech, or sight? Why not use radio to trigger heat devices remotely? In
one such scenario, each person sits inside a box in which the weather of
the other person’s country is represented. Temperature is highly evocative
of the body: To re-create an intimate atmosphere of copresence with another
body, why not make the area one is occupying warm? I particularly
like their idea of a ‘‘hot air’’ button on my telephone that would enable
me to politely let the person at the other end know she or he is talking
nonsense.
Big telcos tend to emphasize ‘‘purposive’’ communication. The result is
all those ghastly television advertisements that feature dynamic businesspeople
making deals over mobile telephones. But in addition to the subliminal
consciousness described by Norretranders, a lot of important
social communication is informal and happens by chance. Just as in the
brain, intense activity takes place in liminal parts of the cortex that
researchers barely understand but know are important, so too in offices,
space designers now perceive the water cooler or coffee machine to be
about as important as the boardroom or personal desk as a communication
nexus. Wondering why similar serendipitous spaces could not also be
enabled in cyberspace, Dunne and Raby came up with telecommunications
moments that allow people to ‘‘bump into’’ other people in distant
spaces.
Design researchers have looked at other aspects of indirect and lowbandwidth,
but nonetheless valuable, communication. During face-to-face
communication, our body acts as a medium that transforms our internal
emotions into external signals: actions, expressions, gestures, postures, attitudes,
and voice intonation. Other physiological manifestations such as
blood pressure, heart rate, and pupillary responses also work more than we
realize—but mainly in proximity through direct physical contact or special
monitoring devices. In a project called Faraway, designers at the Interaction
Design Institute Ivrea in Italy looked at long-distance communication
between loved ones who are physically distant, but emotionally close.
The idea was to increase the sense of presence of a loved person across