How does a sliding scale of success become formulated?All of this is a rather long-winded way to begin a rumination on design group Freecell’s Stack-to-Fold, commissioned by SFMOMA for the Participation exhibition. But I suspect they also expect something in particular. How do designers and viewer/participants gauge “success” when it comes to open-ended or participatory experiences? Especially when the viewer/participant is called upon to follow a given set of rules but also to bring in their own creativity (or even lethargy) and possibly do something unforeseen or deemed “unruly” by the designer? In other words, are all outcomes - especially the ugly - ones… good? Does inviting someone to respond to a work only to have them merely scribble graffiti on it a valid invitation-response exchange in itself? Should designers nod approvingly when their works get turned upside down? To take a well-known and ongoing online example, I wonder how much of the “crappy” or “wrong” responses end up online at the “ Learning to Love You More” website by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July and how do they get weeded out as so? I assume that not every response is deemed a “right” response.What an artist/designer hopes for is a response to their solicitations for participation. Initial Freecell design proposal photographs And who says there’s no success in eliciting joy from randomly pushing buttons anyway? What is right, anyway? And what is, for lack of a better term… wrong? For every fifty people who “do it wrong,” (or don’t do it at all) the one person who does it “right” may really get the right “something” out of it. Of course I’m being more than just a little cheeky here. What I learned, essentially, is that humans are a messy, anarchic lot that, on the whole - and despite your best-designed intentions - will revert to a herd of cats with incredibly short attention spans. What usually happened, comically enough, was a lot of museum visitors randomly banging around on high-tech machinery, buttons being pushed willy-nilly out of sequence, and the lovingly designed graphics ignored and thrown to the winds of instructional irrelevance. Mind you, these were the best outcomes one could hope for. These were the basic goals, with conveying complex concepts falling at one end of the success spectrum, and delivering simple physical results falling on the other. The trick was to frame the instruction in a friendly and “rewarding” way that would make the visitor feel they had gained something (“I learned about quantum physics! Neat-o”), or had done something correctly (“I followed the instructions and the whirly thing spun around”). Take it from someone who once worked as a designer at a hands-on science museum: a large part of my day was spent trying to design instructions and images to coax museum visitors into doings things a “certain way” (push this button) to get a “certain result” (make it go). However, left to their own devices, humans can be an unruly lot, especially when it comes to following a given set of instructions. We are all creators! We are all designers! Doing It Yourself, it seems, is pretty darn cool because it means you can really “have it your way” and the term wears itself like the ultimate democratic and even populist statement. The acronym was spawned from early 1950s home repair manuals, grew to refer to alternative punk and hardcore music, and now encompasses everything from the burgeoning indie craft scene to the Slow Food movement. The term D.I.Y., or “Do It Yourself,” has become something of a buzzword lately, an ethos. “(T)hese objects, once they are assembled, will lend themselves to certain functions, but they might also be reconfigured and used in ways that we can not foresee.Precisely because we might embrace the idea of dysfunctionality-the fact that it becomes more difficult to do something maybe is what makes it more interesting - and provide an open situation.” - SFMOMA curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling Bay Area artist Stephanie Syjuco weighs in here on the successes and pitfalls of ‘participatory’ art, and takes a close look at New York design firm Freecell‘s Stack-to-Fold project, currently in use in our second-floor “ D-space“.