Speculative Design Explorations
TIMELINE
12 weeks
TOOLS
Arduino
Mixed-Media Fabrication
Adobe Suite (Ai, PS, AE)
TEAM
Shannon Wei Lee
Yon Maor
Siriveena Nandam
ROLE
Speculative Design
Visual Design
Experiential Design
A series of speculative design explorations created in Sinan Goral’s Possibilistic Design Course @ Carnegie Mellon with an awesome team of designers/engineers/artists/psychologists.
PRY ME OPEN
It is believed that we often rely on Sight as our most dominant sense. Its exaltation above the other senses also stem from sight being viewed as the most ‘hygienic’ or ‘non-invasive’ social sense, detached from the bodily experiences other senses evoke, most notably, touch.
However, our project argues that this over-exaltation of Sight ignores the way it can suppress sensuous curiosity or the potential for pleasure evoked by the other senses. Sight can also be pervasive – the gaze can be weaponized as a common method of invasion, aggression, or disregard of others. This case can be found in patriarchy and narcissism, and is critically reflected upon in Pleasure Activism.
Our design makes the proactive vision process into a passive, vulnerable procedure. We turned sight into an unhygienic sense triggered by touch. The common and outward action turns into one thing that needs to be explored, as people may experience feelings of the unknown and a curious fear in this process.
By requiring touch as a prerequisite for sight, our frame shifts the power dynamic between sight and touch, allowing viewers to reconnect with the sensuous pleasure of touch.
HEAR THE MOVEMENT
HEAR THE MOVEMENT
Hear the Movement is a … we created a performance art concept that underscores the pervasiveness of surveillance by integrating it into the tangible, moving world via wearables that explicitly displays the mechanisms it functions on.
the relationship between ourselves and surveillance is physicalized by mirroring sensory signals (light and sound) to the surveilling device. characterized through its unique design, our wearables reflect the beauty that simultaneously exists in both order and chaos.
BEHIND THE BUTTON
This piece critiques the cognitive dissonance necessary to function within capitalist society. In this project, there is an interaction between ourselves, an entity, and the button as a barrier between ourselves and the entity. The entity represents both a reflection of ourselves and the negative consequence of our actions. We have a desire to “press the button” even when we know it is immoral. When the button is pressed, we essentially kill the entity, destroying both a part of ourselves and creating a destructive outcome.
