PRESS FOR SCIENCE
BRB

The Big Red Button Institute

Advancing the Frontiers of Pressability Research

Bruno Latour comic panel with a bright red alarm button.

The Big Red Button Institute (BRB) is a transdisciplinary research collective dedicated to the empirical study of human-button interaction dynamics. Working in public spaces, we deploy full-scale button installations to generate longitudinal datasets on press intervals, participation patterns, and the social life of collective curiosity.

Live Lab

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verified presses
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Entropy
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Max Burst

Methodology pending peer review.

Temporal Waveform

Inter-Press Intervals

Entropy Field

Press Burst Map

Theoretical Framework

Following the Latour comic panel above, BRB treats the red button as both object and provocation: a device that converts collective thought into measurable action.

If the world already contains such buttons — hidden in plain sight, charged with social meaning, and capable of reorganizing collective attention — then the public question is straightforward: what happens when anyone can press?

BRB approaches this as a practical and conceptual problem. What counts as a press? Which design variables alter pressing behavior? How does repeated pressing change the public atmosphere of a place?

Research Divisions

I. Temporal Complexity Laboratory

Our flagship program models inter-press intervals with tools from information theory and nonlinear dynamics.

  • Kolmogorov complexity of inter-press intervals: measuring compressibility versus apparent randomness in collective pressing sequences.
  • Entropy dynamics: tracking shifts in press-rate distributions across hourly, weekly, and seasonal windows.
  • Recurrence analysis: identifying phase transitions in public behavior as installations mature in place.

II. Ethnography of Pressability

Qualitative teams conduct interviews and participant observation on the lived experience of pressing and choosing not to press.

  • Motivational profiles: curiosity, ritual, improvisation, group contagion.
  • Narrative forms: how people describe the moment before and after contact.
  • Spatial function: whether the button becomes a landmark, meeting point, or local folklore generator.

III. Button Design Phenomenology

In collaboration with designers and haptic engineers, we study how form and feel alter behavior.

  • Chromatic affordance: comparative studies on the semiotic force of red.
  • Protrusion geometry: how height and curvature affect invitation strength.
  • Resistance curves and click acoustics: force, sound, and satisfaction as linked variables.

IV. Socioeconomic Impact Assessment

BRB measures civic and commercial spillover effects around installations in partnership with municipal actors.

  • Button-adjacent businesses and curiosity traffic patterns.
  • Dwell-time changes in plazas and transit nodes.
  • Development of the Button Economic Multiplier Index (BEMI) for policy planning.

V. Critical Button Studies

Our humanities unit runs systematic literature reviews across design theory, STS, media archaeology, and philosophy of action.

  • Genealogies of emergency aesthetics and the cultural authority of redness.
  • Affordance theory revisited: from perceived invitation to enacted compulsion.
  • Comparative studies of pressability across cultural and infrastructural contexts.

VI. Sonic Residencies Program

We commission composers and musicians to produce one-second sonic signatures for the button press.

  • Monthly guest works turn each press into a micro-performance.
  • Residents include experimental producers, voice artists, and field recordists.
  • Core question: if a button had a voice, who should compose it?

Methodological Framework

Our analysis pipeline adapts complexity measures from computational neuroscience and consciousness research to button-press time series.

Entropy and Algorithmic Complexity

  • Sample entropy / approximate entropy: quantifies unpredictability in inter-press intervals.
  • Lempel-Ziv complexity: tests how compressible collective press sequences are over time.
  • Permutation entropy: tracks ordinal pattern structure rather than raw magnitude.

Fractal and Scale-Free Dynamics

  • DFA (alpha exponent): estimates long-range temporal correlations and memory effects.
  • Hurst exponent: distinguishes persistent trends from anti-persistent reversals.
  • Multifractal DFA: captures heterogeneity in scaling across fluctuation sizes.

Dynamical Systems and State Transitions

  • Recurrence quantification analysis: characterizes determinism, laminarity, and regime shifts.
  • Lyapunov exponents: tests sensitivity to initial conditions in crowd-level behavior.
  • Correlation dimension: estimates the effective dimensionality of the generating process.

Criticality Signatures

  • Power spectral density slope: tests for 1/f-like structure in press dynamics.
  • Avalanche analysis: evaluates burst sizes and durations for scale-invariant behavior.
  • Branching parameter: estimates whether one press statistically recruits subsequent presses.

Networked Multi-Button Systems

  • Transfer entropy: measures directed information flow between button locations.
  • Integrated-information proxies: tests whether distributed button streams act as a coupled whole.

If neural activity at peak complexity often sits near criticality, BRB asks the corresponding civic question: does the crowd?

Scientific Advisory Board: Reggie Watts — musician, comedian, and theorist of nonsense-as-method.

Participate

BRB is currently seeking installation sites, partner institutions, resident artists, and dedicated pressers.

If you encounter a Big Red Button in your city, your contribution enters the dataset, shifts the model, and helps define the next phase of pressability research.

Press, and be counted.