Designed Realities Studio

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.