ADVANCED INTERACTION
Design Yourself
Senior Faculty: Pablo Ros
Faculty: Cristian Rizzuti

Image Credits: Lisa Park – Eunonia II, 2014

Cybernetics, biomechatronics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and neuroscience are creating new artificial corporeal senses that are transforming human perception. This studio explores how the ubiquity of these new technologies and human-computer interaction are expanding the human body beyond its physiological limits.

At Design Yourself students will be exploring this new contemporary condition and designing an extruded electronic interactive body as a novel space for architecture. Assisted by cyborgs, digital artists and meditation instructors, the research will happen in our own flesh and brain merged together with new digital tools. With open source software, microcomputers and soft skin advanced technologies we will design new experiences for the body and the interactive, performative, blurred spaces around it.

We will discuss how our bodies will be shaped and extended in the future and convert into activists that envision interaction and communication predominant over the cartesian metrics.

In this context, Design Yourself, where computers and bodies interact will focus on the production of:

? New corporeal Experiences and Interactions. Navigating from the naked contra-cultural body, new flesh, cyborg, fractal human conditions we will learn how to design Experiences and Interactions, with the aim of improving the essence of the human condition.
? The understanding and navigation of the outer world. The massive arrival of the appliances in the ‘60s to the domestic space, Arpanet, the first interactive cave at MIT, WIFI or the Internet of Things, are radically changing our physical environment and daily life environments. We will design technologies and interactions in our closer built space to ask ourselves: is a new blurred environment of interaction without walls the future of design and architecture disciplines?
? The interconnection between the society members and their space through data fluxes. A new city is being shaped since the first sensorial Pavilion at Osaka’70 until today’s human excluded areas emerging in robotised environments. Centralised, distributed and intelligent interactive landscapes and cities are here to stay and to be designed with deep social implications.

Image Credits: Transpieces Society – Neil Harbisson human antenna (left), Moon Ribas earthquake detector implant (right)

We will learn how to hack central powered organisations and let Siri shape these interactive landscapes. Most important, we will design new data territories that intersect with the real space of our bodies by retrofitting our senses and social relations through data communication.

The course will be mainly organised around two different types of speculative productions:
? New interactive techno-corporeal senses in the second term.
? Third term: The extension of these new senses that aim to communicate with other extended bodies through a digital video-mapped immersive data landscape.

Welcome to Design Yourself, a studio for advanced bodies and designers.

Image Credits: FUSE* – DOKK, 2017