A Direct Message

2019 | Messaging Application

Direct Message is a social commentary on the relationship between human and device, focusing on the role devices and their designed utility play in how we interact with each other, and the difficulties we face in living in both physical and digital domains. This commentary takes the form of a new messaging platform that emulates face-to-face physical interaction within a digital space by requiring users to directly face and gesture to each other to communicate.

Try out our latest prototype (mobile only): adirectmessage.to

Paper

Creative Technologies Studio IV

Collaborators

Gianni Gambassi

Liam Ball

Project Website

Project Documentation

Journal

Why we did it

Phones no longer merely connect us to people; as their available features grow more complex, customisable, and personal, they connect us to ourselves. As mobile technology continues to evolve, we have to keep asking how each additional functionality serves not only as a utility, but as a human purpose. Mobile devices have become more entangled in our lives than ever before, and there is a need to question and acknowledge how they influence our core human values for better or worse.

We are entering a period where digital technology is crowding out opportunities for high-quality social interaction. Advances in technologies that allow us to work on the go, travel safely in unknown territories, and stay socially connected, have coincided with a connectedness to devices that paradoxically divide our attention between face-to-face social interactions and screens.

While we could choose to focus on limiting device use, we could also see it as an opportunity for systematic change. Highlighting the fact that maybe there is less of a problem with our behaviour, but a problem around our devices and their designed utility.

How we did it

We looked at the difficulties posed between communicating in person versus digitally. Incorporating physical interaction into conversation has been found to influence the dynamic and aid the connection formed between those involved.

In providing a platform that bridges the communication gap between physical and digital domains, we also produce a piece of technology that in itself is obsolete. When you are in a space where you are able to directly communicate with another person, what’s the point of communicating digitally at all. It is at this point the platform itself becomes a commentary on the relationship between human and device.