With the research I have designed an installation which is to be placed at public benches. This installation is designed to highlight elements within the environment, and encourages people to engage with their senses via tags that have been attached to the highlighted elements. From the bench itself, people are invited to scan a QR code which brings them to a website. This site confronts the person engaging with the installation with a variety of images I collected during my non-participant observations, of others also being fully engaged on their phone and their online individual reality. The person engaging with the installation, scrolls past these images before arriving at a message linking my research to their actions. There is this dual experience that occurs when one engages with this installation, discovering the shared reality alongside being confronted with the individual reality.

I have embodied some of Odells ideas into this installation, in an attempt in dealing with the attention economy. This installation is an opportunity for people to understand what it is like to periodically step away from the attention economy. By provoking people to use their senses, and activating the tools we have within us there is this opportunity for a re rendering of how we experience a space. By guiding people to stop, they may notice something, which then maybe they can notice again and again. We as humans are curious fluid beings, but as the attention economy gives us ‘what we want’ we can lose this curiosity as we are no longer surprised, challenged or changed. This installation is an attempt to reignite this curiosity and discovery in the reality in which we share.


As my research question was “How can we reimagine the model that the Attention Economy is built off, in order to implement it into the physical sphere, so that we have the opportunity to engage with our spaces and connect within our shared reality rather than individualistic realities we live in online?” I wanted to include some of the design elements used in the attention economy in the installation.

Firstly the colour used to highlight the elements on and around the bench, a bright orange, is used because the eyes are naturally drawn to these warmer brighter colours. The same way many apps changed their logos and have their notifications warm and bright.

Secondly, like push notifications, creating this collection of elements around the bench can instigate curiosity. A milder version of a puppet master, connecting objects together to entice people to find out more.

Thirdly I have numbered the tags on the elements from 6-1, beginning with number 6 the QR code at the bench. This plays into the same method used in social media by numbering the amount of notification we get there is this inner need to get from chaos to order. This also encourages people that there is more to discover, if number 6 is on the bench, there must be more around it.


I have also included some design elements that assists in bridging these two realities. The shape of the tags mimic an application with a notification. This allows for people to understand early on that the installation is linked in some way to phone usage and the online world. On the tags that invite people to engage with their senses, I have the english word on them along with an emoji symbol that links to the action being asked. I choose this as it also initiates the idea that this project is associated with online experience, but also that emojis are a modern day universal language. Hopefully this can encourage people from a variety of linguistic backgrounds.