WhoStupor - Microsite

In Collaboration With Maxwell Holmes

Wabi - Sabi Moment

This project began with selecting our wabi sabi, which in our case, was a picture of a stray dog taking an obvious poop in the middle of a traffic stop in a small village in Mexico, near Mexico City. The whole time the dog was pooping, the light was red, and as it turned green, the dog finished and walked away. 

Extracting Meaning

To us, this memory and photograph represented some kind ‘obvious display of knowledge’. This dog had to have known the environment so well to have pulled off such an act. On the other hand, there was the alternative that the dog was trying to say something, in some form of fecal protest. 

The hard part of our wabi sabi was that the exact meaning and reason of what the dog was trying to say by doing the act was unclear. And this drove us crazy for a good period of time.

There was however, the aspect of what the people in traffic observing the dog, got out of the experience. Although what the dog was saying wasn’t clear, the experience it created for the observers sitting in their car revolved around wanting to be ‘center of attention for a brief second’ in the one of the most attention grabbing manners.

There was also the aspect of envy, wherein the people observing the dog had a respect for the courage of the dog. As if they wished they could be that ballsy and do such an act.

“Shitting on the road in front of a bunch of people. Wishing you could be that awesome.”

Public Peephole Prototyping

Reinterpretation

Trying to find a good connection between being the center of attention & being foolish didn’t become clear until we started applying it to environments. 

We concluded that the one place where people display the most foolishness and crave attention is at the bar. 

At the bar, we are always trying to talk over people so our conversations can be heard. The bar scene attracts a variety of demographics, and most of all, attracts large groups of people. In these bars, Town Pump Tavern in particular, there is a large emphasis on the televisions, and most of the down time attention is arguably spent looking at the TV. 

Concept Direction

At this point we were trying to find a solid direction in how to display being the center of attention in a foolish way. In essence, displaying your foolishness to the world. 

Most of the foolishness that comes out of the bar scene revolves around alcohol, and how your level of drunkness correlates to how you feel.

In our of experiences of drinking, and the memorable / unmemorable nights, there has never been a decisive calculation for how drunk we were. 

So we applied this to our concept, where we were going to display peoples drunkness to the public at the bar on the televisions everyone is used to watching. This would make them the center of attention, and give them a reason to look foolish for how drunk they were at that moment. 

We went through several prototyping stages involving going from attempting to calibrate and put together our own Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) monitor, trying to hack a police grade BAC monitor, to finally creating a BAC calculator on a website platform on an iPad or iPhone that would connect to 2 TVs at once via Apple TV Airplay. 

Final Demo

Using Javascript, JQuery, and CSS, we created a website interface that allows users to publicly insert the number of drinks they’ve had, type of alcohol, time spent drinking, body weight, and gender. (Basically all the variables needed to calculate someones BAC). The site will PUBLICLY tell the user how drunk they are, and give them a reference tip for their level of drunkness (things they be experiencing, advice for the people in the bar, advice for the bartenders) 

Thus reembodying our Wabi Sabi moment.