Theme and Researched
Our project intended to take the participant on a journey from a heightened sensory state, or sensory overload, through to calmness.
-“Sensory overload occurs when one or more of the body’s senses experiences over-stimulation from the environment. There are many environmental elements that affect an individual. Examples of these elements are urbanisation, crowding, noise, mass media, technology, and the explosive growth of information.”
-“Run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend...or not even a legend. Think of all the examples. And how trivial the things we want so passionately are.” — Marcus Aurelius
-‘The Fight or Flight response is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.’
Sensory test:
If one of your senses was taken, what the rest of the senses mean to you, our ideation aimed at taking your sight away in order to strong other senses like smell. We choose a scenario from borough Market(noisy place) to Gabriel's Pier(peaceful place). The differences in those two place are quite different, take touch as an example, in borough market, you would feel a crowded stream of people, they might pump into you, but in the Thames riverbank, you can only feel the gentle wind. We tried to bring this kind of switch to other people who never been there.
Touch:
Our teammates volunteered to act like strangers which might bump into you in crowded places, or say "sorry" or "excuse me" to you, which make people feel more immersed in the scenario we created.
Auditory sense: The headphones play out a soundtrack that uses a combination of sounds collected from our trip around London. The first section of the track combines the sounds of Borough Market and the streets of London and is designed to be intense and overwhelming. The audio then fades into the calmer sounds of Thames and waves
rolling on to the riverbank.
Smell:
Along with the headphones, we wanted to provide other sensory stimulants inspired by the urban atmosphere we experienced on our day trip. We collected several stuffs represent different places, using bacon and cigarette end butts to show the complex environment of Borough market, we also create a bottle of saltwater which means the smell of water.
Presentation:
Tanvi became our volunteer, we first used eyemask to block her eyesight and let her standstill. After we put the earphone on her heads, I and Tonicha pretended we are some pass by, bumped into her, there is not only body contact, to make it more real, we also used backpack and mobile phone as interruptions.
When audio became peaceful, Ann turned the fan on, and Felix use water spray to simulate the wet seaside wind. And pat pulled the rice on the Tanvi's foot in order to imitate the gentle waves of the water.
After this Tanvi told us, without eyesight could be so frightened, she kept what is the thing touching my body, and feel nervous and creepy, but can still felt the change of mind, for, in the second half of the audio, there are less human interferences.
If one of your senses is taken away, you will feel the world in a different way, like in the presentation, your eyesight was blocked, so your hearing and sense f touch will as help you to "see" those unknown objects.
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