“sad hat l happy hat” a new way to experience the city.
In collaboration with Nitipak Samsen "Dot"
“sad hat l happy hat” is one of design interventions in the “benchspace walk workshop”, part of London architecture festival.
We like London, this city-world full of differences, ethnic variety, colors, textures, sounds; within a block distance the environment can change totally. We are perpetually commuting and when we think about architecture, we think of vertical constructions, enclosing horizontal space.
Naturally we have a tendency to look up when we are happy and down when we are sad. We want to bring emphasis on the ground and the sky, amplifying one’s mood. The “sad hat | happy hat” can be worn in two different ways, happy (looking up) or sad (looking down). The reflective surface inside multiplies the perception of either the sky or the ground.
But what happens when you either look only up or down? You bump into stuff! Maybe you need someone to complement your perception: if you are sad you may need someone happy, if you are happy someone sad, to walk together safely.
The object can be experienced in 2 main ways, outside-in and inside-out. The outside-in aspects: the appearance of the hats indicates obviously what mood you are in. This experience critiques our excess of self-awareness in public, how much we care about how others are looking at us. The inside-out aspect provides a thrilling sensorial experience, something different and playful, we might not care how people will look at us, in our own visual and acoustic distorted world.
The “sad hat | happy hat” is a simple playful perception limb that directs and amplifies ones perception and mood, allowing to re-consider how one feels about the city while creating an extreme social relation between the mask user and the others, encouraging the necessary complementary pair relation.
Collaboration with Dot Man Can Do: http://www.dotmancando.info/index.php?/archive/sad-hat-l-happy-hat/
Thanks to Ada Zanditon, Nelly Ben Hayoun, Nasser Moustakin