Design Dichotomies

The introduction panel beside my own account of the setting: a shared studio display that each team member takes over in turn, which I used for six pairs of opposing terms. The panel carries the explanation, my signature and a practice target so a visitor could try the touch mechanism before the boards.

The GE Appliance design studio entrance has a display for individual team members to frame personally inspirational images. About every-other month, a new team member takes over the display. For each single image, I included two opposing terms important to my design philosophy and process.

The first three boards: Culture and Technology, Head and Hands, Inspiration and Feedback. Each is a single photograph split in two, one term and one touch target at each end, so the viewer has to weigh one half against the other and press a side.

The second three boards: Craft and Reproduction, Atoms and Bytes, Solitary and Connected. With the first three they make the full set of six pairs, each split image built to hold a tension rather than settle it.

How the installation worked, in my words from the deck, beside a close-up of the last two panels. A MaKey MaKey board read each touch across the copper strips as a keystroke, a web page spoke the chosen term aloud, and the iPad on the final panel kept a running tally of every selection as paired bars.

MaKey-MaKey is an open-source electronics board that brings interactivity to everyday objects. It is recognized by the attached computer as a standard USB keyboard and interprets each input as a particular keystroke. When a viewer press a button on any design dichotomy, their finger closes a circuit across the copper strips and the associated key stroke is sent to the computer. A web page running a simple script speaks the selection aloud and updates the iPad display.