Hungry, Hungry Anteaters
September 9th, 2012 By NOTAndrew Quitmeyer
The goal of this week’s design challenge is to create a “messing about” that opens people up into simultaneous social and analytical thinking. This challenge was based on Ratto’s paper, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life” in which he discusses the act of “making” as a lubricant for opening up shared social experience and critical thinking.It also spawned from discussions of Greer’s paper “Taking Back the Knit: Creating Communitites via Needlecraft” who promotes the idea of crafts for their socially engaging qualities.
I was attracted to Ratto’s discussion of how “making” brings with it the emotional dimension of learning which tends to be neglected in most positivistic educational methods. He states,
“The importance of affectual relations in meaning-making has also been emphasized in Knorr-Cetina’s work (1997) on the relationship between scientists and the “epistemic objects” with which they work. For us, affect serves as a way to begin to understand the importance of personal investment in linking conceptual understandings of technology’s potential and its problems to everyday experience.”
My work deals with animals, their behavior and performance. Often, I am challenged with the task of thinking of interesting things to do with the ants, or questioning why certain behaviors exist. This is a daunting task, and difficult to pursue in an entirely abstract, mental manner. The same couple of standard facts about ants tend to cycle over and over in my mind, striking me as boring or impractical.
I find most of my successes in digital-biotic design come from direct combinations of abstract research and physical play. For the design project today, I have made a game to explore the “materiality” of ants.
Preparation
First, I went and collected some local, harmless wood-ants from a nearby hiking trail. Next I put the colony under anasthesia in order to paint them with my very own magnetic insect paint. Finally I took some plastic containers and coated them with a non-stick teflon paint (fluon, or “Insect-a-slip”).
Gameplay
The goal of the project is to see what concepts, emotions, and comprehensions arise from the activity. To play, each person chooses an anteater character which represents a different modality for interacting with the insects. In all, the picker-uppers include: Two types of magnetic grabbers, a sticky-grabber, warm mammalian hands, and cold, accurate tweezers. There is also a bonus power-up where people can use an insect aspirator to vacuum up the ants.
The game starts by dumping the prepared ants into the arena, and then, in the Hungry Hungry Hippos style, everyone tries to collect as many into her or his own buckets.
Original Design
