Part One Continuation

After the final group show in which we exhibited our project, The Transient State, it was time to go our separate ways and begin the individual portion of the project. 

Part Two was to be based on the research and information that we had uncovered in Part One of the project. It gave us the opportunity to select an element of our future world and develop a design response to the changing landscape of sustainable development work. The brief allowed for us to explore the underlying complexities of sustainable development and approach it through a post-colonial lens.

Scenario Development

I began Phase Two of the project by identifying some of the areas I wanted to explore in-depth. These areas included the future of the gig economy, the worsening of air quality, the future of automated work and the exploitation of the worker in relation to these areas. By selecting these areas of interest, I was able to generate five design scenarios responding to each area.  

The newly developed role of the ‘professional respirator’ has been developed. The professional respirator lives in an area with clean air is paid to participate in the air exchange with his or her client who lives in an area with highly polluted air. Through the use of a speculative mask that transfers air, the air exchange allows the two to swap the air they breathe for a period of time, allowing the client to breathe in clean air.

The newly developed role of the hair harvester is a role entirely dedicated to growing hair. The harvesters grow hair to be given to the hair craftsmen who then turn it into a replacement for wood, through a process of combining hair with resin. The harvesters are part of a new ecological movement in which bodily materials produced and grown by humans are used as replacements for materials usually taken from nature

The sustainable citizen wears a newly created device that tracks how sustainble they are. This tracking system is converted into a credit system. 

The future bioengineer is dedicated to breeding new organisms to help combat environmental problems. The bioengineer genetically amplifies the attributes of a whale, allowing them to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In this future scenario, the community quite literally shares the burden of grief, in which a grieving person is able to transfer their grief to another community member for a period of time.

Developing a Future Gig Economy

The Studio Andthen Workshop was invaluable as it required me to decisively and efficiently take steps towards the further development of my project. During the workshop,  I made the decision to focus on the future of the gig economy specifically in relation to the future of automated jobs. Revisiting some of the STEEVPLE cards I created in Part One of the project, I was interested in how people are expected to make a living in a future in which 2/3 of jobs are predicted to become automated. 

After I had made that decision, I recognised that I knew the speculative gig economy I was designing, had to be exploitative and reliant on parts of the body or materials produced by the body that could be sold for money. I brainstormed different bodily materials and their potential exploitation in a capitalist society. At the same time, I knew that it was essential that whatever bodily material I was looking to exploit had to be rooted in a speculation that, 10 years down the line, could actually be true. This brought me to CRISPR/Cas9 Technology, a gene-editing technology that allows a living organism’s genomes to be modified. Once my research had taken me to this new technology, I knew that exploring the possible implications and misuse of gene-editing in a future gig-economy, in which the body is already exploited, could be an area worth exploring in order to show the importance of providing people with an income or a way of making income when jobs are inevitably replaced by machine. 


Possible Future Scenarios

Once I had decided that I was investigating the future of CRISPR/Cas9 and its relationship to the gig economy, I created a matrix that outlined four different speculative scenarios in which the selling and buying of genetic material was possible.  The matrix ranged from citizen-led to government-led on the y-axis and exploitative to sacred on the x-axis. The matrix allowed me to explore four different scenarios. The first was a scenario in which the selling and buying of genetic material was citizen-led, but was done in such a way that the body of those selling was exploited. The second scenario was also citizen-led, but the bodies of those selling were considered sacred and treated as such. In the final two scenarios, I considered a reality in which the buying and selling of genetic material was government-led and explored it through both an exploitative lens and a sacred lens.

This investigation allowed me to consider the myriad ways in which the future of buying and selling genetic material could look. From there, I moved forward with a combination of both government-led and citizen-led, exploitative scenarios. This decision was largely based upon the ways in which the current gig-economy operates, and how this method of working could be projected into the future. After making this decision, it was time to decide how exactly this future world  look and the speculative service that I would be designing.

I brainstormed the ways in which a gig economy based on CRISPR/Cas9 technology would look specifically focusing on Global North and South relations and the exploitative nature of this kind of work. Eventually I decided to focus on the Body Commodification Gig Economy which would be run by the Ministry for Economic Advancement. It would require people from the Global South to sign up as employees and undergo a genetic assessment to discover the genes they possess that may be appealing to the buyers in the Global North. The design itself presented a completely dystopic future, but one that we are not so far away from currently. I felt it was important to emphasise the exploitative nature of the scenario, while basing it off of real-world occurences to show that if we are not careful, globally, we will slowly be moving towards realities in which the one I am presenting becomes true.

After I had identified how the service was going to work, I got started on building the system model. I decided to stick with the same materialty I had used when building the matrix, a combination of paper and foamboard. I felt this was a good way to built up the scenario, as I was able to model all nine steps of the service, detailing what would happen at each step of the way. 

Now that I had the system model mapped out, it was time to identify the touchpoints and how I could design for them. I recognised that one of the most important steps of the system was the process of transporting the genetic material (saliva) between the seller and buyer. I started working on the packaging design for the saliva sample that would be used for the genetic assessment. This saliva sample would be delivered to the buyer in the Global North. It was important that the packaging took on a medical aesthetic while also adopting the hyper-capitalist identity of this future world. As a result, I designed packaging that appeared like stereotypical medical packaging with a coupon for the buyer’s next purchase encouraging them to continually buy and change their genetic code. 

Finally, I concluded the project by making a video prototype explaining the service I had designed and how a speculative user would navigate the system. The video prototype can be viewed here.

See Future Experiences Part One Here.︎︎︎

Studio Andthen Workshop 2

In the second Studio Andthen workshop, we selected our chosen concept to move forward with. We used rapid prototyping, storyboards, and props in order to explain our concept to others. 

The one day long workshop culminated in the production of a one-minute long video using any objects or materials we could find. The purpose of the video was to help us to explain our design concept to the other students and for us to quickly and decisively determine the best way to communicate the project at its current state. At the end of the day, we had a screening showing all of the videos we had created. 

My one minute video was based on one of my five scenarios entitled “The Air Exchange”.  In the video, I portrayed a person who made their living by breathing in polluted air, so that those who live in polluted areas, in dire need of clean air, are able to pay for the Respirator’s services and breathe in some fresh air. The video was based on the current ways in which the gig economy is exploitative of its workers and how in an automated future, people may be forced into literally selling their body to make an income. 




















Matrix Outcomes

The Body Commodification Gig Economy

System Model: Step 3 in the Body Commodification Gig Economy

The Packaging