Spectacle \ Spectacles

MONDAYS 1-4PM 2255 N.QUAD JAN 10 - APR 19 2022

Kanye West performance in Grand Rapids, MI as part of the Saint Pablo tour on September 27, 2015

Purpose

To learn and apply the fundamentals of information architecture. 

Rationale

Human beings have been creating and participating in spectacles for a very long time. It's something that people seem to require, something upon which our human thriving at scale seems to depend.

In a really dumb way, spectacle helps make everyday experience and the norms of the people in a given place tangible. Because spectacle is the opposite of everyday experience.  Or in some cases, it might be more correct to say that spectacle is a hyper-intensifying of everyday experience, where the familiar is made strange through radical changes of scale, color, shape, pattern, etc.

The de-familiarizing effects of spectacle on participants' perceptions of reality must play an important role in human thriving.  So too, the de-individualizing effects of spectacle on participants' perceptions of their own selves, through simultaneous co-location with lots of other people.

As far back as 10,000 years before the common era (Göbeklitepe), we see evidence of humans shaping the built environment in order to better accommodate the embodied enactment of spectacle. For 30,000 years or longer, we've been setting aside places, situating material, and encoding information for the purpose of augmenting and extending the effects of spectacle (Chauvet, Cáceres).

Approach

The conceit in SI658 in Winter 2022 is that we can use contemporary tools and technologies toward these same ends.  That human thriving through participation in spectacle can be enhanced through design interventions that have to do with the situatedness of information before, during, and after spectacular experiences.  Say, through the mechanism of an XR/AR wearable like a pair of spectacles.

As the semester progresses, we'll be asking many questions:

  • What is a spectacle, even?

  • What role does the situatedness of information play in un-augmented spectacles today?

  • Who is more and less welcome as participants in a spectacle? Can AR/XR increase accessibility and equity?

  • What is the potential for doing harm by augmenting participation in spectacle by adding and situating information using AR/XR?

  • Can we apply what we learn about spectacle to help us do good work as designers of ordinary products and services?