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Life Span
2018 | A speculation on the plausible future of extra sensory implants.
Our understanding of neuroplasticity has allowed us to start designing products that train our brains to understand streams of data as a new ‘sense’. What would it be like to have a constant sense of your life expectancy changing?
Life span is the manifestation of this idea, the future descendant of current wearable technology, Life Span is implanted directly in your nervous system.
Based on Alva Noë's theory of 'Action in perception', our brain can not passively comprehend the stream of information coming from our sensory organs. We truly perceive by our actions.
Life span uses this theory to communicate this speculative sense through four familiar actions. Operations that create small, large, positive and negative changes in our life expectancy.
Now that we are the largest threat to our own life span, how will our relationship with mortality evolve when we perceive our life expectancy changing with our actions?
Life span was primarily communicated in an installation, a 4x4m horse shoe shaped room, built of translucent fluted polypropylene.
Framing this design in a separate space helps users suspend their disbelief and entertain this speculative thought experiment, engaging with a timeline, movie and artefact of this design future.
The installation's artefact was a proposed sensory implant, an example for the audience to picture engangled with their own nervous system.
The interior implant is made of polished brass rod, organically entwining with your nervous system through it's organic branching structure.
After inspecting the model implant, users get a chance to be further immersed in the idea by using the 'experiential chair'. On which an interface offered four scenarios of changing life span, communicating their potential feelings through light, sound and haptics stimulations built into the chair's structure.
A full write up of the research, ideation, prototyping and execution can be found here
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