“at your service”

at your service was my final B.Des project at IDC, IIT Bombay, installed twice in 2019 — once in the senior classroom, once at the Design Degree Show. People were allowed to interact with it as I kept developing it over two months, and I baked in some of these stories into the final script.

Virtual concept mockup — Originally planned to be a tablet in the middle, within a cobweb of strings

The composition was a deliberate mess. Objects arranged around a room so they read as working together on something, with a Kinect reading the room as a 3D point cloud and virtual hotspots you could walk through as portals. The mess was the point: people wondered whether everything had been placed deliberately, and a few asked whether it was meant to be a crime scene.

A hanging webcam — This webcam is wrong.

Sensors on a tablet — What can this computer feel?

Live camera feeds were cropped into swatches and projected back onto the space. The graphics were baked in real time across two laptops, replaying the last few seconds over the present — so it would show you still typing after you'd already stopped.

vvvv patches between two laptops – talking to each other over OSC.

Projection, typing — The modality of chat is human.

Projection, hands — “Warm fingers you have there.”

Projection, threat — ELIZA threatens to shut down.

When the conversation turned to scrutinising you, a camera would kick in and people felt suddenly reminded they were being watched — which they liked enough that some asked for it again.

You'd also find post-it notes left behind by earlier visitors that seeded the next person's conversation. Some were warnings, some were instructions, one just asked for patience on her behalf.

Post-it notes, bugs and a USB stick — Thumb drive taped to the table that 'stored bugs'.

And yes, this was a crime scene. An artefact/evidence of me working on it over the course of the semester. I baked in some fictional narratives that augmented the actual format it was built – the room changed (the AC, a dear friend, was removed), bugs were squashed (stored in a thumb drive), hard reboots (plug point sealed with tape so it doesn't plug itself out), script rewrites (the script would reveal itself as a script, and the meaning-making was all in your own head!)

What I was trying to allude to: service as an arrangement that manufactures someone you're allowed to be horrible to. This machine makes that legible because you wouldn't expect it from a machine.

It worked, by the only measure that really convinced me: a friend who'd spent a while talking to it yelped in an elevator afterwards, feeling guilty for spamming the button to close the door.

Talk to it ↗ — This is a version rewritten for web. More tweaking required for replicating the same emotions that the original installation evoked.

Here's the real ELIZA ↗ that this is a fork of – I just modified the script file to make it say things I want, and categorised some of the responses to ENUMs which the renderer can use to serve certain sentiments.

There's also a project report ↗ (PDF, 27 MB) submitted so I can be let go from college.