Political Intimacy, The Whisperphone

By: Ruby Schaap

Tutors: Peter Kraaijeveld & Dorian Kingma

Keywords: Politics, Protesting, Intimacy, Participation


With this project I aimed to design a way for citizens to express their political participation in a positive way. The interaction between civilians and politics is often based on negativity (protests or objections) and the importance has been stressed by philosophers, like Hannah Arendt: political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians. (1968). I designed a more intimate and positive interaction with politics, by creating a reversed megaphone (a whisperphone) placed in front of City Hall Rotterdam, that summarizes, combines and plays the whispered messages of people.

Design goal: Enabling citizens of Rotterdam to express themselves towards the politics in front of the municipality building in an intimate and positive way to reduce the distance between citizens and politics.

Interaction vision: The interaction vision is the context of a theatre during the play when an actor is looking at a person in the audience making eye contact.

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