Useless Network / Indoor Outdoors
A Completely Natural Simulation
The project brief states that we are to “design a project that assumes a massively networked and sensored world. But take an ironic perspective on this future world, and design a project that either makes fun of it, comments on the dangers, is a humorous take, or is otherwise a useless application.”
Indoor Outdoors from Dustin York on Vimeo.
With that in mind, I came up with a product I call the Indoor Outdoors. In my tongue-in-cheek future world I envision a very unpleasant place that is sterile, walled-off, isolated, and cold. Due to the degradation of the environment and a society that has reverted to survival mode, every futuristic person lives in a dreary, window-less room and there is little outside interaction. To fill the emotional void left from such persistent claustrophobia, I invented a portable window frame that the consumer can use to situate as they please in the middle of their featureless abode.
The promoted benefits of Indoor Outdoors is that through its use the participant will be able to recall precious memories and be able to imagine breathing fresh air, all while remaining in the safe confines of home. In the future however, people will only be able to recall memories of looking out the window at urban wasteland; things like industrial factories, concrete walls, and electrical grids. In the future this will constitute what the ideas of “fresh air” and “sentimental views” has come to mean.
Opening the window frame automatically prompts a static video with an accompanying urban sound (sirens, traffic, drunken brawling, etc.). Opening the window again triggers a different static video to play. Little to nothing of action happens in these videos, in this way the video can loop again and again, and the user would barely notice the persistent repetition as it echoes their own action-less existence. The window also comes with a “daytime mode,” triggered by another sensor attached to a different student’s project (Scott Liao). Daytime mode is an overhead light that shines on the window and paradoxically drowns out the projected image; meant to poorly mimic sunshine pouring through the window. And, of course, there is also a “nighttime mode,” representing when Indoor Outdoors is turned off.
I hope this project be deemed successful in that it represents an ironically humorous scenario through a seemingly useless item. In this world, the future citizen will be destined to hold as precious instances of visible decay—as this will come to represent what was once good in their lives—rather than regard the images as signifiers leading to their current situation.