Not a manifesto or a brief

Following just over a week of prototyping I still feel haven’t produced enough but I know what I am going to make for my final show. So that is progress. Talking to Ruth and Luke earlier this week really helped me sort my ideas out so I’m going forwards with the confessional booths of a kind. It started from the confessional booth and this sentence I’d written in my sketchbook at some point; “ways of mediating conflicts [discussions] for people who struggle to voice their opinions.”

So the way or device for this would be the confessional booths. Obviously they might not literally be booths but this is where I’m taking it from but at the moment it seems to be some kind of barrier to limit physical contact, verbal communication, which allows for written or typed communication instead. The ‘booths’ allow for a certain amount of abstraction from the situation, and anonymity in the same way internet or text [in both cases speech is avoided] does, letting people express their opinions more fully than they might otherwise. so then there are a lot of questions to answer, which will [hopefully] work out through prototyping and testing. It needs a context, almost crertainly the home for people who live together, or a series of context or possibly a series of three [?] similar contexts where different concepts and realisations can be utilised. Public and/or private? It raises quite a few questions:

Is it a device which is bought into a space which changes it into this “confessional area” or a box-like structure which is a space in itself?
Who goes?
Why do they want to use it?
What do they get out of it?
Does it just begin a debate or control it or both?
Public or private or both?
Typing or writing?
Verbal or no or is there a certain point where speech comes in?
Certain rules or rules become inherent in design?
Is it a system or a service with an object?