PP2 – A WALL WITH AN AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT STYLE
Posted: December 18, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For our Pressure Project 2, our task was to go to place where people are interacting with an automated computer system of some sort, spend time observing how people interact with the system and how the system makes people feel. After documenting the system with diagrams and pictures, we were asked to put on your director’s hat and re-design/iterate the system so that it is “better” or “more nefarious”. The day this pressure project was assigned, I knew that I wanted to re-design a system to be more nefarious before choosing what system I would interact with because as an artist I felt more interested in the playful creativity aspect rather than the functionality aspect.
To begin my quest, I went to Otherworld, the immersive art installation in Columbus, by myself. There were many different and interesting rooms and stations with many automated computer systems. In choosing which one I would use for my project, I had two criteria in mind. It needed to spark my interest and it would need to be an area where I could stay for a long period of time to observe. While wandering around enjoying the installations, I found myself lingering in a room, instinctively beginning to observe how people interact with it. It didn’t have a title but I named it Coloring the Painting on the Wall System.
I did a quick (and obviously very aesthetically pleasing) drawing of the system and the surrounding setting.
I’m sharing some of my notes and observations about how people interacted with it.
After documenting my observations in my notebook, I continued my stroll around the installations, interacting with various systems in the space. Because I already spent time observing how people interact with one system, I found that I became more attuned to how people interacted with the other systems in the space as well. As a dancer, I often find myself more kinesthetically engaged with automated computer systems. In this space, I also had the opportunity to observe people engaging through other modes.
After my field trip, I moved on to the next exciting part of the assignment. How could I make this more nefarious?
This question came with an additional question of what nefarious meant for me and how I would define and express it experientially. Around the time of this Pressure Project 2, I was going through a particular experience in my personal life, not understanding why someone was behaving the way they were. Their actions felt nefarious in response to how I was trying to interact with their nervous “system”. So I decided to translate my frustration with their nervous system into an automated computer system.
Inspired by a conflict, creating “A Wall With an Avoidant Attachment Style” made me transform resentment into humor, and realize even more that even small changes in timing and responsiveness of automated computer systems hold the capacity to change the experience of the user drastically. While I hope no one would need to interact with “A Wall With an Avoidant Attachment Style”, I do think that in re-designing the qualities of the system, I got a better understanding of how automation and emotion intersect. This is an aspect I can meaningfully use in other designs now, whether nefariously or not.