Acrylic and electronics

Reiterative Communication Aid: 7 x 10 1/4 x 12 5/8" (19 x 26 x 32 cm); Personal Adviser for Reintegration: 8 1/4 x 11 3/8 x 13 3/8" (21 x 29 x 34 cm); Conversation Challenger: display: 3 x 6 3/4 x 3 1/4" (7.5 x 17 x 8.4 cm); device: 3 x 2 5/8 x 3 7/8" (7.5 x 6.6 x 10 cm)

Gerard Ralló imagines what sort of help we will need with communication in the future as certain skills are strengthened by developing technology and others erode. The Reiterative Communication Aid addresses the fact that we would be better off without most of the idle conversations we find ourselves dragged into. The device, worn around the neck and displaying a screen, tracks the wearer’s conversations over time; once a back-and-forth pattern is established, the screen provides automatic answers to mundane questions so the wearer does not need to. Conversely, the Personal Adviser for Reintegration preserves the habit of what the designer calls “sporadic, banal conversations with no aim behind them” for future generations who have lost the ability to engage in small talk. It, too, is worn around the neck, with the display screen positioned so the wearer can quickly read prompts for benign topics and tepid questions, thus ensuring the survival of polite conversation without requiring the user to think. The Conversation Challenger embodies the designer’s theory that our access to unlimited information will cause us to lose interest in each other as human beings. The device listens to a conversation and offers related content culled from the Internet, forcing a choice between another person and the machine. With it, the designer asks if it is “really possible for someone [to] be more interesting than everything else?”; the Conversation Challenger’s answer is generally “no.”