Jennifer wearing the spinning mirror hat
The spinning mirror hat is intended to be a wearable mirror that attracts the attention of the people around you. It forces social interaction because you don't know what's happening on top of your head, and need someone else to explain what's happening to you. It's also an exploration of self-excluding and includingness. You can rotate it such that the person you're talking to sees themselves or doesn't.
Next steps:
- Make the experience more rewarding for the hat wearer. Perhaps it could be some sort of backwards hat, where the mirrors go down in front of the wearer's face.
- Add mirrors to both sides of the "hat" so that the wearer and people around her can both experience the self-excluding and including mirrors. This way, sometimes, the viewer would see his face in place of the wearer's, and sometimes the wearer would have no face.
- It would be cool if all the mirrors were either self including or self excluding, and turning the hat changes the angles of all mirrors. I think this would be a more powerful illustration of self-including/ excludingness than the gradient of my prototype.
- Make it easier to spin the hat, perhaps by adding a long stick and making the part that turns lighter (don't turn all the mirrors).
Ideas:
- Make it huge. Enter a room of self-including/ excluding mirrors. It might be scary to see so many of yourself and then they all disappear with the push of a button.
- Play with light and mirror reflections (e.g. when someone accidentally shines their watch into your eyes). When walking back to my dorm with my hat, there were a lot of interesting patterns on the ground because of sunlight bouncing off all the mirrors.
I like your idea to have some sort of mechanism switch the mirrors from self including to excluding.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of an entire room of self including or excluding mirrors. I think the experience I had with those mirrors at the exploratiorium was interesting, but an entire room would take the immersion to the next level.
ReplyDeleteI think your hat idea could be improved on by just having a second hat. I think the current hat needs a bit of redesign, but by adding a second hat you make it a much more immersive experience for both people without having to totally change how you wear and interact with the hat.