Sometimes you just want to hide...
Shyness: the feeling of being nervous or embarrassed about meeting and speaking to other people (Oxford Dictionary)
Let's
meet
shy
some
creatures...
Crown Shyness. A phenomenon that can be observed in some tree species, in which trees avoid growing into each other, by simply practicing social distancing.
Learning about this phenomenon made us think of shyness as the fear of touching each other and inspired us to slowly create some basic features that define shyness.
Shylight - A Kinetic Installation and Art of Movement. Nyctinasty is a mechanism of self-defence that can be seen in some flowers during night time. This mechanism inspired Studio DRIFT to create a moving sculpture that unfolds and retreats to its original form, which replicates the phenomenon seen in flowers.
Thinking about unfolding and going back to the original form, we connected this set of movements to the idea of trying to overcome your shyness, but ultimately going back to square one. Hence, we got the idea that trying to befriend the shy one comes in stages.
darlings bench. was designed against Scandinavian shyness. The benches aim to force people (in a gentle way) to communicate with each other.
This design gave us some ideas about how to interact with the shy one. We thought that the way we position ourselves could ease the process of befriending.
Our work is inspired by the shyness that us (humans) exhibit. We got triggered to explore this trait as shyness can be experienced regardless of being an introvert or extrovert, but it is rather situational. Also, the examples presented above helped us explore the feature through design, nature and art works; which took us on a journey of discovering reasons, stages of shyness but also possible ways of overcoming it.
Hence, we created a shy light that was ( FORTUNATELY) befriended in the end. On the left side you can see its living environment and trust us, it has been quite a difficult journey to convince the light to come out...
At first, it seemed to us that the light was going to easily come out. In fact...
the light was retreating to its roots.
But if you are curious to see how we tried to befriend it by gently getting in front of it (Thanks darlings. for the idea) just watch our video.
But what did we learn from this creature?
In the beginning of the project, we thought that everything was going to be about the need of the robot to be shy.
However, while playing with the light we actually discovered our need and want to befriend the light. Hence, we discovered that the project was (perhaps) more about our need to contact with the other, rather than the shy light.