Design and Responsability
an interaction design project
This project is a result from an exercise proposed by the professors of the respective curricular unit I attended.
In theoretical terms, the exercise is mainly based in a reflection on the responsibility of those who and are invited to work without remuneration, the evaluation of the context in which they are asked to work and the prediction of consequences that will result from it.
In practical terms, the final product needed to be a kind of poster (dynamic or static) where are introduced notions of computational art, generative design, and/or interfaces and interaction design. The poster had to be done with influences of a technological component (present in the process or final result), and have the phrase "Whenever you agree to work for free you are harming others" ("Sempre que aceitar trabalhar de graça está a prejudicar outros", in Portuguese).
Process
The aesthetic style used was based in the picture language Isotype. I represented a population of workers through some man figures and the responsibilities and pressures placed upon them through weights. I divided the phrase in four parts and placed them on the weights. Two parts of the phrase (weights in black, "Whenever you agree to" and "you are") were considered neutral for the harm of the workers, and the other two (weights in red, "work for free" and "harming others") were considered harmful.
Through Processing (a tool based on the programming language Java used to create visual content) I built an interactive application, with the use of a library of a physics engine. The final idea, although not applied, was to exhibit the work in a touch-screen where people could interact with the red weights.
