Your Road to Leisure

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Brief: how the event of the 1909’s Strikes in Malmö can be reactualized and remediated by reworking them into a critically engaging collaborative and intermedial public memory production directed at the citizens of Malmö by shifting between material properties. The purpose is also to critically reflect upon how meaning is transformed when it is recontexualised, retranslated, recycled and re-placed

Malmö University | Master in Interaction Design | Collaborative Media course

Individual / group work: group work. The project was a collaboration between Kent Cam, Sarah Homewood, Dorien Koelemeijer and Danai Tsouni

Date and project duration: 1 month, March 2015

Goal of the project: through an interactive exhibition, to reflect individually upon the phenomenon of hyperemployment: In the past, working hours were determined by the locking of factory gates. Now, changes in technology mean that we take the factory home with us, allowing work to invade every waking hour. This phenomenon is what we call Hyperemployment. Leisure time is in decline, and even what we would call leisure activities are being used for someone else's profit.

The exhibition took place in Media Evolution CIty, which is the hub for the media industries in Malmö.

My Role / skills: research, ideation, concept development, graphics, planning space lay-out, laser-cutting.

Further action: will be presented in "The Conference - Exploring complexity in a digital world" conference in Malmö on the 18th of August 2015

YOUR ROAD TO LEISURE

An exhibition about how working time and leisure time are mixed nowdays. This is called "hyperemployment."

The visitor has to pass through four interactive steps in order to find out how much hyperemployed he/she is.

The first step for the visitor is to get the map that will help him/her navigate through the exhibition.

Step #1: Dayline

Throughout our day, work permeates leisure and vice versa. To help us understand the extent of your Hyperemployment, create your own Dayline.

Instructions:
Use the coloured post-its to divide the hours of a regular weekday into work and leisure; Yellow is for work and blue is for leisure. Every post-it counts for one hour.

Step #2: Multitask

The endless, constant flow of email, notifications, direct messages, favourites and invitations are fighting for our attention. We are constantly distracted, both during working hours and leisure time. In order to better understand your condition we ask you to complete the Multi Task.
Instructions:

Your job is to immediately reply to incoming messages whilst completing the survey provided. Your results will be monitored and recorded as part of the consultation. You have three minutes.

(Further explanation: the incoming messages are: emails on the laptop, sms on the mobile phone and chat messages on the tablet.The process is kind of stressful, but the goal is to make the visitor think how familiar this process is in his/her everyday life today.)

Step #3: Data Accountant Service

Even during leisure time we are working. The online activities we think of as leisure, for example hanging out on Facebook or watching Youtube videos, are a form of labour. These companies function because of the content that their users produce:
“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” - Anon.
Instructions:

Fill in the invoices provided to find out how much your leisure activities are worth and how much you are owed for the work you have done during your leisure time.

(The invoice was printed and given to the visitor.)

Step #4: Final destination: Leisure

You have now reached the final destination on YOUR ROAD TO LEISURE. One of our consultants will be with you shortly to deliver your prescription. Welcome to Leisure.

(Further explanation: the visitor's performance in the first three steps determines how much hyperemployed he/she is. According to this, a specific amount of time is provided for pure leisure. The more hyperemployed the visitor is, the more pure leisure time will be offered. The visitor lies down in a comfortable position, his eyes are covered and he/she is listening to very relaxing voice talking about focusing on the body, and just relax.)