DIGITAL CULTURE - TEXT NECK REMOVER

DIGITAL CULTURE

This assignment was about observing how technology is affecting human behavior and investigating how our body is evolving due to use of technology. The first part of this process was observation, and almost everywhere you can see people that is bending over their computer or mobile phone. This is a problem I can feel on my own body, when I sit for too long working on the computer I totally forget to care about my body posture, something that leads to headache, neck and back pain.

Carly and I decided to focus on the bent neck pain. We imagined that we in the future will have long bent necks, caused by our relentless use of mobile phones. I would say that our approach on this project is both critical, speculative and problem solving at the same time. Critical because we are criticizing our society with humoristic and exaggerated illustrations of how we are/will look like. After observations and research we found that neck pain caused by technology is already a big problem, our project is speculative because we are showing people how we might look like in the future, and also what we will need to use for preventing this problem. And this brings me to why our project is problem solving, its because we are actually making something that will "solve" the problem and improve our body posture.

We think that its going to be impossible to make people stop using their phones, therefore we wanted to make something that will help people keep a good body posture while they are using their mobile phone.

When people are walking in the streets looking at their phone, they are kind of in their own bubble. Our accessorize does not prevent people from being in their own bubble, it actually helps people to still be in this digital world, but one thing is different - the body posture is now straitened and no one is suffering from neck pain.

OBSERVATION

We looked at peoples body posture while they where using digital devices. Everywhere people are bending their neck to look at their phone. By reaching online we also found that many people are struggling with the side effects from having a bad body posture. The problem is only getting bigger and bigger, while we continuously use our phones, and also start to use them earlier in life. This phenomenon has been given the name Text Neck. And since we want to help/and prevent people from having text necks, we called our project "The Text Neck Remover".

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RESEARCH: According to Hansraj,5 “text neck” may lead to early wear and tear on your spine and early spinal degeneration. As you repeatedly pull and stretch this area, it may become inflamed over time, which can result in muscle strain, pinched nerves, herniated discs, and abnormalities to your neck’s natural curvature. This forward neck posture has also been linked to headaches, neurological problems and heart disease. That is sad because it is relatively easy to assume a healthy natural posture with your neck. All you need to do is slide your chin up at 45 degrees, which puts your head over your shoulders and causes your chest to move forward.

TEXT NECK REMOVER

Sketches, process and prototypes:

PRESENTATION