Normaal Space is a commissioned work for the exhibition: The Object is Absent, presented during Dutch Design Week 2019 at MU Art Space. The exhibition was a radical experiment in exploring a design exhibition without objects creating a contrast to the over-materialised Design Week. The installation formed part of a design research into our defined interpersonal spaces. What happens when we begin to change these defined spaces? How do people engage with ‘normal’ interactions of handshaking, kissing or gesturing when these defined spaces change?

The anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s research into interpersonal space or Proxemics forms the starting point for the performance. Proxemics is the study of human use of space and deals with the amount of space that people feel is necessary to set between themselves and defines categories of interpersonal distances into four distinct zones namely: intimate, personal, social and public space. What is interesting is how defined these spaces often are with precise measurements provided for each zone. The installation looks to challenge these precise measurements by presenting different interactive zones per day.

The installation Normaal Distance forms part of the travelling exhibition: Designs For Different Futures currently exhibited at the Walker Art Museum, Minnesota, USA.

We seem to be in a constant state of risk management, from government protocols to our own interaction restrictions. We are in a constant state of negotiation, assessment and evaluation with our current surroundings. The installation explores the relationship between trust and risk in the current pandemic, asking participants to assess a potential interaction using modified distance related Risk Management models. What would be the cognitive risk assessments that are now undertaken to engage with another individual?

Normaal. A performative design research that explores how the handshake - a simple social gesture - has become coded with immense nationalistic meaning and examines how our definition of normal influences our suspicions of others.

In the current climate of terrorism, fear mongering and populist politics suspicion have become an arena for manipulation and control. Our rigid suspicions - riddled with prejudice and bias - clouds our minds and limits our engagement with the world. As our environments become more complex and our interactions increasingly isolated, it is questionable if our suspicions are evolving fast enough to confront with the challenges of our modern world. Through our uncertainties we start to retract to smaller and smaller groups we can trust – retracting to cultural identities and to family – until we find ourselves alone and suspicious of everyone and everything around us.

Suspicion is often constructed in opposition to what we consider ‘normal’, stigmatising abnormal and strange manifestations as suspicious. Our dependence on the ‘normal’ to define suspicion can restrict our engagement beyond our cultural and social boundaries. We can start to challenge our notions of the ‘normal’ by exploring the absurd and abnormal through the lens of suspicion. By means of designing these abnormal interventions, the thesis looks to develop tools to explore and disrupt our suspicions.

The handshake can be defined as a negotiation between trust and distrust. A ‘normal’ cultural gesture so ingrained in our daily lives that by abstracting the handshake we start to challenge our existing social norms and constructed identities. The handshake becomes a potential tool to investigate suspicion. Through disrupting the interaction of shaking hands we confront our definition of ‘normal’.