Designed Realities Studio

Please Just Let This Moment Be, by Yoshe Li, explores how the worlds of dreams and everyday life might come into contact through objects and images informed by her day dreams (Designed Realities 24)

Please Just Let This Moment Be, by Yoshe Li, explores how the worlds of dreams and everyday life might come into contact through objects and images informed by her day dreams (Designed Realities 24)

Quantum Romantics is an attempt by Ranger Liu at understanding love and desire through the lens of quantum mathematics, presented as an hour-long performative lecture and 60-page notebook. (Quantum Commonsense 23)

“Treading lightly in a world of many worlds.” Catalogue essay for the NGV Triennial 23.

We began to wonder what it would mean if we took von Uexküll’s idea of an umwelt more seriously. Rather than thinking about how to invite non-humans into a human world, maybe first we need to undo how we imagine the human, at least in terms of how we appear, or are present in, non-human worlds – how we are transformed, materially and conceptually, if we acknowledge that non-human worlds exist, based on different senses – olfactory, electrical, seismic, magnetic, auditory.

“Treading lightly in a world of many worlds.” Catalogue essay for the NGV Triennial 23.

“Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival” is part of the NGV Triennial 2023 in Melbourne. Photo: Kate Shanasy. Co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne. This project is produced in collaboration with RMIT School of Design.

“Archive of Impossible Objects: Globes” is part of “Terra. Designing our Planet” at MUDAC, Lausanne. Photo: Etienne Malapert.

“Archive of Impossible Objects: Globes” is part of “Terra. Designing our Planet” at MUDAC, Lausanne. Photo: Etienne Malapert.

“Dark Life” by Emily Martin (MA Media Studies), conceptualizes a posthuman and post-Anthropocene life that might exist long after humanity has gone extinct. (Who Comes After the Human?, taught with Prof. Dominic Pettman, 2023)

Image from a codex by Emily Martin (MA Media Studies), that serves as both an art book and theoretical text that speculates the potential mutations and evolutions of extremophiles who thrive because of anthropogenic alterations of the planet. (Who Comes After the Human?, taught with Prof. Dominic Pettman, 2023)

In this microfiction by Guan Hao Zhu (MFA D&T), sensors are deployed around the city to alert others to the presence of overlooked qualities, co-inhabitants and events. Rather than extracting data for commercial uses, it suggests another role for monitoring technologies that aims to strengthen and deepen connections to the urban environment. (Designed Realities class, W/S 23)

‘Dear chair: Where do I end, and you begin?’ A performance by MFA Design & Technology student Six Lauture, exploring the relationships of space and matter, human and object, change and relationships through an embodied connection between two arrangements of atoms: “chair” and “me”. (Designed Realities class W/S 23).

In ‘Fire Starters’ Anthony Isaac (MFA Industrial Design) explores product design’s complicated relationship to fantasy, reality and authenticity through the design of a series of illogical, but still functional consumer products. (Designed Realities class W/S 23)

A glimpse in MFA D&T 1st Yr student Ranger Liu’s exploration of EM Lang, constructed language based on hydrogen. How would this language be written? How could we, as sonic interlocutors, interpret this language within the limits of our bodies? (Designed Realities class W/S 23)

As part of her BFA Design & Technology thesis work, ‘Grass Listeners’, Krithi Nalla used the class to experiment with a deeply intuitive approach to conceptualizing, making and showing ideas that complemented her main thesis project work. (Designed Realities class W/S 23)

Public Library of Useables: Shashwath Santosh’s (BFA Product Design) absurdist take on useability, taken to an extreme. Designed only from the point of view of affordances, at multiple scales, each object is valued for what it might be used for and the everyday possibilities, or impossibilities, it suggests. (Designed Realities class W/S 23)

Lila Feldman’s ‘The Algorithm’ imagines a machine’s attempt to render its inner world and obsession with people’s interactions with everyday objects — juice cartons, plastic bags, tissues boxes, etc — legible to humans. Part of Lila’s MFA thesis in D&T (Designed Realities class W/S 23).

Work in progress. Undoing the Human. After Jakob von Uexküll’s ‘A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans’. Thanks to Franco Chen for the umwelten data.

Work in progress. Undoing the Human. After Jakob von Uexküll’s ‘A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans’. Thanks to Franco Chen for the umwelten data.

Work in progress. Undoing the Human. After Jakob von Uexküll’s ‘A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans’. Thanks to Franco Chen for the umwelten data.

A sample archive image from Pedro Bernstein’s ‘Department of Perimatterology’. The project explores and critiques the idea of ‘measurement’ through alternative methods and logics. Extensive project documentation can be found on the website. (Designed Realities 2022)

Video still from ‘Encrypted Dialogue’ by Yuqing Liang. A wearable device functions as a “translator” that allows humans to sense the EMF-based dialog surrounding them. (Who Comes After the Human?, taught with Prof. Dominic Pettman, 2022)

Grace Mervin’s ‘The Center for Emerging Transitions’: At the Center for Emerging Transitions, we are committed to dismantling the false “one-world” myth of Compulsory Reality, or CompReality. (Designed Realities 2022)

Work in progress. Undoing the Human. After Jakob von Uexküll’s ‘A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans.’ Thanks to Franco Chen for the umwelten visuals. Part of An Archive of Impossible Objects.

Type 1

Type 1

Meadow

Meadow

Lila Feldman’s Improbable Container series explores “how a consumer society’s value system may be inherently embedded within, and therefore guided by, product packaging”. (Designed Realities 2022)

Munus Shih’s zine, ‘National Baby ZhuaZhou Referendum’, remixes the current western referendum based voting process with ZhuaZhou and other Taiwanese traditions, such as Auspicious Ruler, Poe Divination, and Enlightenment Gong to ask: Who gets to decide the future of a nation? How are the procedures and rules in different systems defined? And why are they the way they are? (Designed Realities 2022)

Quinn Mason’s The Life and Songs of an Implant, partly composed in collaboration with GPT-3, documents the imagined reflections of a plant linked to a computer (Who Comes After the Human? Taught with Prof. Dominic Pettman, 2022).