CulturalProbes

BillGaver's design strategy. Invent interesting objects, inject into a community and see how they react.

Good example from a talk he gave. He worked with a convent of nuns whose mission is to retreat and pray for the world's sufferings. He designed a small LCD screen showing tweets that had been grepped for "sad" and "depressed" etc.

The screen was embedded in a heavy wooden case that echoed the ornamentation of the convent (a lot of catholic religious objects.)

One interesting result : The nuns called him back to revise the filter because the tweets were full of trivial / FirstWorldProblems type stuff.

Interview