2018—2019

The brief examined how design can be deployed as a world building activity; how fiction can inform and inspire the creation of an alternative reality. For this project, the literary and cultural phenomenon of the ‘Zombie’, the ‘Alien’ and the ‘Other’ were used to create and explore new modes of existence and organisation, to unravel the space between the possible and impossible.

Zombies, aliens and others have been explored culturally, chemically and legally, in literature and numerous times through film. In recent years the rise of the Zombie as a contemporary cultural phenomenon might be attributed to the apocalyptic realities and speculations we have access to through global press and media. This project is set out to expand the notion of the zombie to include a space where entities interact, conflict and clash due to their difference. The awkward, interstitial space of interaction, between these entities provide the context for design opportunity on a multitude of scales.

The act of zombie-likeness that was observed for this project is situated around the extensive use of handheld digital devices, such as mobile phones or tablets. To gaze at such devices puts the user into an inanimate state, very much like that of what we consider to be a zombie characteristic. You could say that to use a mobile is to abide to a counterculture that is against what it really means to be human.

The design rhetoric that surfaced from these observations was this idea of device as body extension. This rhetoric played a major part in the exploration of this project and one that interprets the wide array of personal and intimate technological devices as an inseparable part of our body.

A series of biological and technical speculations were produced to consider the possible futures of our hands if the prolific use of hand held devices continues. The design speculations explore the themes of inability but also of prosthesis.

Orange Filter for Blue Screens
Digital image
2018


Thumb Disabler
Digital image
2018


Worn out Thumb 
Digital image
2018


Necessary Fingers
Digital image
2018



Additional Digits
Digital image
2018


Thumb Amputation
Digital image
2018