Anab Jain
Interactive Design and Film

YELLOW CHAIR STORIES '
Video projection, wifi access, chair, screen

“My WiFi network is open for neighbours and passers-by. Free access from the yellow chair.” By placing a sign with this message in front yard of her home, along with a yellow chair, Anab Jain, invited neighbours and passers-by to use her open wireless network outside her house creating a ‘live’ grass roots design project which challenges the idea of open networks being largely virtual and often impersonal.

Generating a dialogue with people and making them participants in the development of the design process was an important element of this project. A documentary film and an accompanying book of the project illustrates how a ‘grass roots’ design approach can re-invent spaces for conversations, at the threshold of the public and the private, the physical and the electronic.

The project also shows how the meaning of personal space and identity changes when geographical and virtual spaces merge.

Anab Jain, of Indian origin, graduated in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art. She is a 1st Prize winner of ‘GMW Award for Working Life’, Design for our Future Selves Awards 2005, Helen Hamlyn Research Centre for Inclusive Design, RCA, London. Jain’s main interest is to explore the consequences and implications of new and emerging technologies on everyday lives. People are the 'contexts' for her work, whether it is the design of services, products or interfaces.


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