Muscle

To be honest, this is a really difficult post to write. When I initially read Speculative Everything and Hertzian Tales I thought there was a small piece of my brain that understand what I was reading and how Dunne and Raby’s designs and prototypes are examples of speculative design. If I hadn’t had any context I would just assume they were weird art projects with no meaning. Why would people go through such depth analysis to explore these insane prototypes they built just to make people ask questions. I kind of left this block of confusion to rest inside of my brain. And throughout class, I had a moment where I actually felt like I saw a lightbulb turn on and I got it. I understood speculative design, especially in relation to Muscle. 

My thought was that are all of these products and experiences were designed for us years and years ago before it was even sure that they would technologically be possible. And what they proved to do was eliminate so much movement in everyday choreography that it became detrimental. So people are frantically trying to redesign the future of our choreography through product and experience designs in the hope that we don’t end up like those people from Wall-E. And even when I said this, I wasn’t even sure what I said.

But then we had our class when we were given future situations where things like chips embedded in our brains to increase to a super-human intelligence was the norm. And through physically acting through that, things became a little clearer. And then there was the class when we learned about the Grotewski method and acted like spastic cats doing a yoga flow and things became a little clearer. And then I worked on our final project where I proposed there would be a universal gestural language that would enable people to communicate via holographic lenses in a world where there were no devices. And this process started having me ask questions.

Writing this retrospectively, Alex Todaro’s presentation was still a game-changer for me. I think this was the class that changed my perspective of design and opened the first door of understanding design in a different perspective. I loved learning about his ideas and fascination with interfaces. I also loved that some of the ladies challenged him when he showed the first interface to be a baby feeding from a woman’s breast. The idea of having that be known to be the first interface makes me begin to question how we all move through the world in a greater scope. For example, if a baby feeding from a breast isn’t as intuitive to everyone as being our first interface, does that have any connection on how we understand and communicate in our lives. Is there a ground that is common in design? I started this class believing that you are designer or  you’re not a designer—that there are certain softwares you must know in order to be a designer and certain colors that only designers understand to be beautiful or ugly. I hadn’t thought of thinking like a designer.

This class was great as it gave light to the previous reading in Speculative Everything. I think many of us came to class feeling a little unsure of our understanding of Speculative Design. I definitely felt that the in-class activity helped me with clarification and gave me more ideas into how Speculative Design works. 

I worked with Jordan and Ella about a future scenario where there would be a chip embedded into our brains when a child turns 13. That chip will give us unlimited intelligence. As always in this class, I loved to perform. I truly believe that’s opened a new door of understanding new materials. 

http://www.ravynwhitley.com/muscle-final-spring-2016/

Miss y’all already!

Here are the links

pdf https://drive.google.com/a/nyu.edu/file/d/0B3IcwXwSXUxgQVBBZV9FdDk5VWM/view?usp=sharing

video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaH481t2Mog&feature=youtu.be

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