Design a speculative body-scale device that engages a larger reality and situates that encounter within contemporary life.
Your device must do three things at once:
1. Engage something larger and real. The device must establish a credible relationship with something larger than the individual - a physical phenomenon, environmental force, technological system, social dynamic, temporal rhythm, or other condition. It should register, respond to, translate, or otherwise make an aspect of that reality sensible. The relationship must be grounded in how that reality actually operates, even where the proposed device or its effects remain speculative. Simply illustrating or symbolizing the relationship is not enough.
2. Implicate a body. Someone must hold, wear, operate, occupy, carry, or orient themselves through it. The body is not simply the audience; it is part of the encounter.
3. Shape attention. Through its use, the device must cultivate a particular quality of attention. You should be able to show what kind of attention it asks for, why that matters now, and how the design conditions it. Consider what the device asks a person to do differently: slow down, wait, compare, align, listen, follow, return, notice change, or become aware of something they ordinarily overlook.
Your device must do three things at once:
1. Engage something larger and real. The device must establish a credible relationship with something larger than the individual - a physical phenomenon, environmental force, technological system, social dynamic, temporal rhythm, or other condition. It should register, respond to, translate, or otherwise make an aspect of that reality sensible. The relationship must be grounded in how that reality actually operates, even where the proposed device or its effects remain speculative. Simply illustrating or symbolizing the relationship is not enough.
2. Implicate a body. Someone must hold, wear, operate, occupy, carry, or orient themselves through it. The body is not simply the audience; it is part of the encounter.
3. Shape attention. Through its use, the device must cultivate a particular quality of attention. You should be able to show what kind of attention it asks for, why that matters now, and how the design conditions it. Consider what the device asks a person to do differently: slow down, wait, compare, align, listen, follow, return, notice change, or become aware of something they ordinarily overlook.
Your proposal may be speculative, but its relationships should be grounded in reality.
- Research how your chosen reality actually operates or manifests, then speculate on how a device might bring someone into a meaningful encounter with it.
- Prototype and test the device's central interaction: what it does, how a body participates, and how the intended relationship becomes perceptible.
- Where the larger phenomenon cannot be reproduced directly, use a convincing simulation or analogue to test the design principle.