TABLE OF CONTENTS Psychosocial narratives refers to the unique narrative potential of electronic products, the world of desire and fiction that embraces consumer goods, the socialization that the use of electronic products encourages, and the idea that behavior is a narrative experience arising from the interaction between our desire to act through products and the social and behavioral limitations imposed on us through the conceptual models they impose. For instance, although an essential part of everyday life, the telephone embodies crude concepts of social etiquette compared to furniture and architectural space.
This chapter looks at the following ideas: the user as a protagonist and co-producer of narrative experience rather than a passive consumer of a product s meaning; how the psychological dimensions of experiences offered through electronic products can be expanded to include darker conceptual models of need usually limited to cinema and literature by referring to the world of product misuse and abuse; the lack of work by authors and filmmakers exploring this area, despite its prevalence in everyday life; the idea that the designer, in their role as a provider of new behavioral opportunities, becomes an author working in a medium that can present experiences rather than represent them; and how the electronic product becomes a role model bringing about transformations of perception (and conception) in the user as a protagonist by embodying unusual psychological needs and desires in pathological electronic objects.
The phone and the film projector surely need us to bring them to life, to dial the number...
