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‘Transient Reflections’ is nominated for the NEU/NOW Festival 2009.
The festival will present the most exciting and creative artistic talent emerging across Europe and is organized by The European League of Institutes of the Arts.
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We live in a time when change happens at an accelerating rate and I believe that design will have an increasingly important role in terms of intermediation.
Drawing from Interactive Storytelling and Design Probes while relying on participatory and performative principles, this project is about approaching design as a kind of story-creation research practice, affording playful, collaborative, experience-led explorations of the uncertain realm of time we call the “near future”.
Understanding people is central when designing for experience. Is it, however, becoming increasingly important to ask questions about what it means to be human?
Tales of our emerging post-human future not only figure into popular culture, but it is also the subject for a number of scientific and ethical discussions. Biotechnologies and information and communication technologies are examples of new and emerging fields where the traditional definition of the human-being in western culture is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish.
‘Transient Reflections’ provides emotional and intellectual stimuli to create an open-ended story-world. It is a play with ghosts and mirrors, bringing up issues around the transcendence of dimensions and existences.
It consists of a series of design fictions exploring the gray area between being human and being other, inviting you to participate in the conversations regarding the role of technology in our society and the future for mankind.
Where do you begin? Where do you end? What do we want the singularity to do for and with us? To what extent has the notion of time, such as in the process of aging, relevance in the creation of a meaningful existence?
While spanning ambiguous and complex topics related to embodiment and disembodiment along with time-based aspects such as bringing up, educating and aging this design-led exploration is accompanying the current debate with an experiential layer, heavily relying on designed artifacts as catalysts for engaging people in speculative activities and conversations.
As objects for interaction, the artifacts are designed with radiance enough to afford multiple interpretations and perspectives. They work as hubs for bringing participants from different disciplines and backgrounds together, as well as catalyst for collective speculation and discovery, supporting continuous co-creation and sharing of knowledge.
As invitations to play, they become important in terms of their possibilities to act, both as embodied composite queries and simultaneously as “props”, allowing the participants to immerse themselves in the design process, to create events together and to see challenges and opportunities in new light.
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Made-Ups
Made-Ups consists of a haunted beauty mirror transcending the image of the individual from being capsulated in a physical body, to being a part of its environments, during the act of creating one of our designed selves.
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Your Friend Goo
Your Friend Goo is an artificial breed, brought to life by a machine. Besides its physical presence, this entity has multiple replicas existing in a parallel dimension. These shadows of itself autonomously reproduce over time.
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Escape
Escape consists of a liquid consumable, a fluid that affects the lens of the eye and slowly starts a process which progressively diminishes our ability to focus. By stimulating the eyes natural course of aging (Presbyopia) this product introduces fragility and vulnerability as a commodity.
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Designers working in the intersection of business, science and technology, are not only coming to deal with merely application, usefulness or usability, but also to handle navigation in broader fields containing increasingly complex philosophical, moral and ethical issues.
‘Transient Reflections’ is revolving around Post-humanism interpreted as a field for raising inquiry, for investigation and understanding rather than a state or an ideology. In an attempt to move from merely intellectual discussions, cinema or laboratory settings disconnected from lived experience and the practical concerns of everyday life, this project aims at inviting decision makers as well as the broader public to participate in the conversations.
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Co-creative field sessions
The potential of the design artifacts was tried out in practice in the context of a series of co-creative field sessions together with selected people involved in decision making that will influence our future.
The participants ranging from politicians, policymakers and managers to everyday people on the street were invited to play and collaborate in the creation of fictional stories and reference worlds relevant to possible real-world issues. Purposely kept in the realm of near and far future speculation, these activities were not aiming at finding solutions to problems but rather serving as design inspiration.
In this particular study an interpretative method derived from Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism (rhetorical analysis) was tried out, not only in order to gain a common understanding of the interrelationships of things and to discover connections between actions, purpose and possible implications. But also to help the participants glimpse into their different symbolic realities supporting a holistic understanding of the projected Experience Scapes and their inherent power relations.
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Please see below for some selected photos from the fields:
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What makes design unique in the context of research is the use of design as a research tool itself. This is a process often referred to as Research through Design. ‘Transient Reflections’ constitutes a part of my research with EDG (the Experience Design Group) exploring and pushing co-creative, experience-led research methodologies in the interdisciplinary field of Experience Design.
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For further details don’t hesitate to get in touch.
