Vera Jansen
Participatory performance, student work for WdKA, (2025)
What
A sign that disrupts the routine of waiting on a tram by performing a useless act.
Why
Time feels distorted when we are made to wait, especially when we have to wait on a tram that always seems to be delayed. Design systems influence this perception, and our interactions with them have become so ingrained in our routines that we don’t really question them.
How
Place a sign at a tram stop. The sign has a visual language with a sense of authority and efficiency. This act should make participants critically reflect on their behavior and what influences it.
CREDITS:
Team: Bas Halling, Josephine Heijnen, Vera Jansen
Useless act questioning legitimacy
Useless act questioning perceived influence
Useless act questioning efficiency
Useless act that questions our obedience to arbitrary rules
Useless act questioning our freedom of movement and its purpose
Useless act questioning unwritten rules
Useless act questioning social values
Useless act questioning obediance to contextless instructions
Process
The main interest of our group was the perception of time, and what influences it. Five minutes in the club go by extremely fast, while having to spend five minutes waiting for a tram feels like forever. Our goal was to find out what causes this and how we can disrupt this system.
Our process was guided by the following research question: “What factors within spatial and social contexts shape the human perception of time, and how can these factors be manipulated through design to disrupt perceived waiting durations?”
The project involved multiple design sprints exploring the concept of time, the exploration of artistic references, research in spacial design, and various site visits.
The locations included tram stops, but also different waiting areas. We came up with different variations of what it woud mean if we recontextualize elements from these designated waiting spaces, and place them at a tram stop. As shown in the process book, these explorations resulted in multiple variations, ranging from the introduction of queue barriers to placing a reception desk or ticket dispensers. Finally, we decided to use deliberately authoritative-looking signage that references the visual language of RET. Through this, our goal was to explore if authoritive language motivates people to perform a useless act. We made different signs that explore a variety of useless acts, exploring different meanings that shpould make participants question their routine behaviors.
We subtly manipulated the RET logo by adding a letter ‘’p’’ to it, spelling pret. This was done to avoid trademark infringement and also to subtly indicate that this is a fictional design intervention.
Our full process can be viewed through the interactive flip book below.
Reflection on group work
During this project, our group had a process that went in many directions. In the beginning we were still very much looking in which direction we wanted to go.
Our plan was that we would all brainstorm individually and then exchange our ideas. This gave us a little more direction, since we came up with the subject of influencing psychological time. However, the topic was still too broad to work on concretely. That became especially clear to us in the kitchen review.
We had all our different ideas with the overarching theme of psychological time as a presentation, but a concept was not there yet. In the other groups we saw that there was already a strong concept and idea of execution. This made us realize that at this stage we should already have a clearer and more defined idea.
We met several times and decided that we wanted our location to public transport stops, and that our goal was to make sure that people saw their waiting time differently, more like appreciated time (rather than wasted time, which is how we framed it earlier in our process). This was followed by many brainstorming sessions. We put all our ideas together and wrote down all overlapping characteristics. We were very surprised how many things came across and that we were actually all doing the same thing but spinning around each other a bit. The common ground our ideas shared was the disruption of a routine through questions and the element of surprise. First, we wanted to make a project that asks participants questions. However, we decided that our project would be most succesfull if we could get participants to ask themselves questions, rather than us having to provide them.
With these words and elements we have come to our final ideas. We started working this out right away at school. There were many setbacks such as the printing station that was closed, signs that we could not buy anywhere, trains that did not run, trams that did not run so there were no people at the stop. But because of our distribution of roles, all those setbacks are finally done. Everyone has taken on a task to solve and if someone could not be present due to a out-of public transport, that was compensated later.
During the social experiment itself, the distribution of roles was very good. Josephine filmed, and Bass and Vera built everything up. Later, Josephine edited the video while Vera made the site.
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