La Li Lu Le Lo

Duration : 1900 hours to 2100 hours IST

Outcome: Final concept

An intensive round of brainstorm took place. Here we first poured our brains over all our 4 sheets & discussed our individual ideas. Some passed , some failed, some didn’t connect to the word serendipity enough ,so we let them be. 

In Serendipity + Space we tried to explore ideas revolving around creating a digital space which when viewed unconsciously affects ones’ habit, or creating an unexpected experience such as “Toilet as a bookshelf” or using “Backtracking” , wherein you have a mirror to your own self with a delay in time, as a technique to highlight the intricacies of the past which would further create connections.We were also looking into how sound could be connected to serendipitous encounters, which we returned to eventually as the rest of the post would elucidate :)

In Serendipity + Quest we explored ideas of a box which would contain random stuff. In order to sort through the box one would eventually come across some things that we didn’t know existed in it! An idea revolved around this metaphor trying to recreate a desktop application where the screensaver picks up random elements from the contents of the C:/ thereby pointing the user to an experience of “oh i didn’t know this existed!” Similar ideas could be applied to the idea of a ‘quest to know more’ in the form if an intuitive interactive library system. We also tried to understand the importance of mazes & unexpected twists within it. In terms of a quest we tried to understand what made a maze so intriguing & interesting..

In Serendipity + Person we tried to explore the perspective of a  person interacting with his surroundings. We put ourselves in situations/ occurences of serendipity & decided to take on a dimension where we could enhance/ increase the possibility of serendipitous moments. Eg. Could we replicate the experience of physical bookmarks into conversations where one can begin & end a conversation when desired? (bookmarking conversations) or does that defeat the whole purpose of serendipity? Could we think of ideas where the concept of ‘Paying it forward’ and leaving your own trace could be encouraged. We also tried exploring areas where we could feel an upsurge of human emotions. eg. In a space, could the color of the room change according to the color of the shirts worn by the people? Would this enhance interactions between the users in the room?

In Serendipity + Play we played with scrabble, tangrams & mechano. We realised our moments of serendipity revolved around instances like doodling, fiddling & other unconscious activities with the objects around us. Through tangrams & mechano we render 2 types of moments: one where you know what to make & find a quicker way to make it and the other where you happen upon a structure unwittingly.
During our discussion here we came up with ideas like google hopscotch which skips a few results to make google searches more random or digital mirrors that question the symmetry of the human body by making it look asymmetric. 

After analysing all 4 topics in great detail, we understood that our basic categorization revolved around either recreating a serendipitous experience for the viewer or increasing his chance of being in a state of heightened awareness where his sensitization to minute details & random connections drastically enhances, so that he doesn’t miss such moments.

BUT WAIT! What about our AHA moment??? Surely it was beautifully serendipitous & if only we could just push ourselves a little to come up with a concept within the frame of the beam that shone through an obscure opening in our studio…. 

Could we?

Hmm……..Humm….

HUMM! Within the frame of light in Serendipity + Space we had the keywords: Nature, crowded spaces, pubs & blank space. While thinking how to relate all these together, we had a friend approach our studio & mention to us ,

“Hey! This tune’s been stuck in my head for the whole day! What is it ?? Any idea?” & he went on to hum a tune…

This moment brought a sudden flash of revelation into our lives when we exclaimed “SOUND!” Sound & space! We hum tunes as a completely instinctive activity.. So what if someone else.. a totally unknown stranger starts humming the same tune.. wouldn’t that be a crazy serendipity? We exchanged ideas as to how that often happens, and how it never fails to astound!!! 

At this point we consciously tried to involve moments of serendipity to our thinking process. By this we were hoping to understand randomness of words & how they connect & how (& if at all) could it lead to a serendipitous moment…

Duration: 1600 hours to 1830 IST

Outcome: Brainstorm on plausible directions.

Throughout the day we’d been throwing ideas at each other (literally while playing with rubber-balls) At this point we took out words from all these ideas/ brainstorm/ thinking sessions that struck us the most. We tried to restrict ourselves to two max 3 words per person. We came up then with these terms:

PLAY, TRAVEL, OPPORTUNITY, UNEARTH | UNRAVEL , CHANCE, EXPERIENCE, QUEST, SPACES, UNEXPECTED, FRAME OF MIND, HIDDEN, LAYERS, PKG/PRODUCT/SPACE; ONE EXPERIENCE FOR MULTIPLE USERS (perceived in different ways) OR A SINGLE EXPERIENCE FOR SINGLE USER (perceived differently each time).

Overwhelmed with too many directions to look at, we decided to go totally random!!! With a deep sigh & gathering the strength to say bye-bye to our hard work we decided to make Harshal cross out his least favorite terms; (& wow he crossed out all our favorite terms, namely travel & layers!!!! but we’d decided to abide by our decision and with a heavy heart bade farewell to those terms).

Next we asked him to pick out his favorite terms. By now, already used to letting go of concepts we were personally attached to , it didn’t bother us too much and we now had 4 terms to think about: PLAY, SPACES, QUEST, One person, many experiences.

We then took up each word individually, handed each one a marker & started randomly linking each word to serendipity. We then switched our sheets amongst each other thrice till we all covered topics, and had linkages established.