One of the important aspects of play and prank is to encourage people to explore joyful potentials of mundane life.
The society put the grid of banal behaviors, blinding us by its banalisation. Both play and prank are means to go beyond the current norms, or systems, and make a positive shift to the next civilisation.
In 50's and 60's, Situationist tried to use play in a city as a tool to build the next civilisation. For them, manipulating the existing context of objects and architecture and creating some new meanings out of them (detournement)would lead people to realise the next civilisation which is based on the new norms.
I'm aware that the play in terms of playfulness, and play in terms of situationist are slightly different. Essentially, however, both play is the same in terms of observing things from the perspective which is free from the established way of seeing things.
Then, what's the difference between play and prank? Simply speaking, the difference is if it needs victims or not.
For me, prank needs victims as it's called "Practical jokes" in other words.
One of the historical pranksters, Abbie Hoffman, was an American social and political activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies"). His aim was obviously to be against the conservative social systems of America in 60's to 70's.
An American media artist Joey Skaggs is famous for his hoaxes, aiming at screwing up the media and reveal mass-media's manipulation on people.
At this point they need someone to be embarrassed or even sacrificed to show off their stupidities.
However, there is exceptions. For example, in the manifest of the company called Improv Everywhere, they stated that "Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places."
Although they mentioned "Long form improvisation troupe which executes pre-planned "missions" which usually involve socially awkward or unusual situations", what they do is basically to encourage people to get involved in their lovely pranks and cause enjoyable mess in public.
I would love to encourage people to be more playful, but I don't want to cause any victims, so I gave up pranks. So there was playfulness left. Then I asked myself again that do I really want to design toy or games? Well, could be, but if I can intervene more ordinary aspects of daily life, I would be more motivating for me.
Then I looked back what I've done in the past, such as this.
And I found this.
[source: http://dkds.ciid.dk/idp09/students/mayo-nissen/]
When I found this, I felt like less-motivated to complete my sort of knock-communicator, but it gave me the interesting words "Ambient Sociality".
This device is for "people who work isolatedly to experience the presence of other, geographically dispersed people in a way that is at once playful and non-intrusive. "
This work really helps me to realise Why I prank.
My pranks are not aiming at annoying people or even anti-{insert your words here!!}
Since I'm not a native speaker of English, especially when I speak to someone whom I didn't talk much, I'm so afraid of annoying them that end up being less-speaking.
However, I DO want to communicate with people a bit more, then I try to do something playful in order to attract people's attentions, or even communicate by these playful behaviors.
In that sense, I tried to achieve nonverbal communication which aims at, for me, confirming that I'm connected to someone.
I think that the desire to stay in connections with others is one of the essential desire of human-being. That's why these social networking services, and GPS apps such as Foursquares are so popular.
But for me, these social networking services are still deeply relied on verbal, or linguistic communication.
As you can see in the example above, sometimes people want to confirm that they are not alone but can't be bothered with too intrusive verbal communication.
I think that is the place where I can match myself as a designer with the social contexts.
As an international student here in London, I do know the demands to get rid of loneliness, the difficulty of verbal-communication, and the importance of playful, or I would say emotional, communication.
I think Ambient Intelligence is the issue for me. But Ambient intelligence as encourage smooth, playful, and emotional communication among those people who are in need.
As expressed in the term of "Ambient", they are not like the feeds on facebook or tweets on twitter.
They are merged into the environment, and being as a possibility for people to interact with someone when they are in need. Also, sometimes they positively sense the people's need and modify our environment in order to smooth our communications.
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