My goal for this project is to portray an understanding of the hypochondriac epidemic created by medicine and related products that are marketed towards the fear of illness. I am trying to prove that media actually has an impact to the extent that it convinces people that they may have illnesses that they had never even thought of before and that this is a bad thing. What I need to know is HOW this actually harms us. Like if people actually do take too many medications, if illnesses are invented rather than actually discovered, or expanding on LeDoux's comment about how when we undergo long periods of stress, our cells die, and then what?
I'm looking into the history of science and the evolution of illness this week, and I think for my next experiment I would like to create a series of medicine products of the future, which will cure illnesses that do not exist yet, I hope that they will seem incredibly ridiculous but will be able to reference history in a way that they could be entirely possible someday.
For this experiment I boarded the L train at the end of line and set up my tests before anyone had boarded. I wanted to see if I could get passengers talking about the objects, what they thought about them, and if they interacted with them. The Purell was successful because many people had something to say, usually along the lines of how they have been seeing them everwhere. The text was successful because it was easy to understand. In one instance a passenger noticed it sometime after he had been holding a pole that read "15 people sneezed into their hands and touched this pole today" when he quickly let go and held another pole instead. The images of viruses went unnoticed, I think people thought it was graffiti. For the next, I gathered all of the medine products in my apartment (combined mine and my roommates) and took note of the fear each is targeting.
-I believe that fear is used to market products relating to health and illness. I am interested in exploiting this theory in orded to better inform consumers. By selling
-By selling products that market to fear, are people being encouraged to think that thee is something wrong with them that can be cured by whatever the product is offering them? I am arguing that people have enough things to be afraid of, and may benefit from not being fed more ideas that lead them to believe they could be made better by another device.
I have realized that choosing this topic that explores why people buy the things they do may be "self destructive" when approaching it from a product designers perspective of actually having to create a product in the long run. From speaking with and reading about the researchers I am interested in I am starting to understand the differences between emotional and psychological fears. Many doctors seek to understand fear from a psychological perspective, but there are some (the ones I am trying to speak with) that study it emotionally.
This week I tryed to contact:
-WNYC and FAIR. No response, but realized that I don't really need need a journalistic perspective as much as a medical perspective.
+ Talked to neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux who specialized in research on the emotional brain, fear and memory. Gave me good statistics of people who are abnormally effected by fear. Suggested I contact one of his collegues, Daniela Schiller.
2 comments:
Hi Monica,
I agree with you 100% about the use of fear as a marketing technique. Many products succeed by appealing to our hypocondriacal tendencies. this disinformation creates pernicious cycles of wastefulness, unnecessary anxiety, and probably actual illness. but this is not a failing of product designers as much as it is an abuse by marketers. Are you interested in trying to expose this harmful influence by creating a product that does not pander in this way? If so, we need to see more concrete examples. It may be difficult to achieve this very ambitious and laudable goal. This is a thought exercise that will require you to follow your arguments to their logical conclusion, and you have to be very consistent and dogged in your reasoning.
You seem to be suggesting that the best way to proceed will be to create fictional products that promise to cure illnesses and disorders that we don't know that we have (yet). This could work; by creating products that very obviously capitalize on the human tendency to find causes for our unhappiness in external, invisible hazards such as germs, you may be able to shed light on this problem. This is like using satire to prove a point. the hard part is to not look like you are just criticizing without proposing any kind of remedy. Have you ever read the book Gulliver's Travels? This is a great example of literary satire. I wonder if there is a parallel in product design....
steven
Steven,
That is a dilemma I am facing right now. I love satire and I think creating products that do this for fear is a good exercise for me but not exactly what I want my final outcome to be.
If Gulliver's travels are a satire on the tales of explorers and the Onion is a satire on journalism then perhaps a product design equivalent would be like many of Dunne and Raby's designs. Products designed for situations that very well could exist but at the same time are making fun of what is actually being used.
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