David Roedl

John Zimmerman, design professor of CMU, spoke at the Informatics colloquium today. His topic was “designing for the Self” and his aim was to design products which help people become the people they want to be, or at to at least feel like they are. His approach was to focus on the way people construct and represent their identities through possessions. Specifically, he want to to create products which evoke the same level of attachment and idealization of self that celebrities do.

This notion of representing yourself as the person you want to be reminded me of a video we watched in Jeff’s Experience Design class last week:the Bjork video ‘Bachelorette’ directed by Michel Gondry.

While there are many ways to interpret the video, to me it is a commentary about media culture, about forms of representation. The book symbolizes the heroine’s self-representation, how she thinks about herself, who she wants to be and who she want others to see her as. The fact that the book writes itself while she reads and obeys, symbolizes the feeling that we begin to live our lives through representation rather than the actual experience.

I’m reminded of a common experience I have while attending a really good concert. Somewhere in the middle, I’ll realize that I’ve stopped listening to the music because I am busy thinking in my head about how I am going to describe the concert to a friend later. I have to force myself to stop constructing a narration of the moment and just experience it.

One one hand, I am extremely inspired by Dr. Zimmerman’s insight into the nature of how we construct our ’selves’ . On the other I am concerned with the question of how healthy or preferred certain degrees of self representation actually are. At what point does self-reflection becomes self-absorption, and begin to get in the way of lived life?