The Body Architecture studio online workshop (November 12, 2022-January 7, 2023) explores designing unique wearables for different natural and artificial environments and how the human body and its prostheses react and adapt to these future trends.
Course Introduction
Throughout history, the human body and technology coevolved, generating forms of deep symbiosis that materialized in a vast web of artifacts and prostheses that mediate between individuals and the environment. Ultimately, all wearable products, medical devices, tools, and means of transportation, and the city itself can be interpreted as an extension of our physical bodies. These technological prostheses increase the chances of survival and expand the human experience.
In the future, abrupt changes in the climate and the ecological crisis will rapidly change the environments in which people live. As a result, we can expect even more extreme conditions, with changes in the atmosphere’s composition, expanding desertification, and flooding of vast territories.
It is possible that in the future, our array of prostheses and body extensions will have to be redesigned to adapt to such fast-changing conditions.
The Body Architecture studio workshop aims to anticipate such needs and develop a design agenda that explores and describes emerging opportunities. Projects will speculate on transformations of natural and artificial environments and how the human body and its prostheses react and adapt to such trends in climatic change. The projects will eventually propose the design of a specific wearable artifact or a vision of a more radical transformation of the human body.
While primed with software and design techniques, participants will form small groups to develop their projects. Research into historical, contemporary, and fictional case studies is highly encouraged, spanning from any gear developed through human history to adapt to aggressive environments to contemporary sportswear and tools for space and deep water exploration to science-fictional examples of body transformation and extension.
The Body Architecture studio workshop is flexible to encourage different time scales and degrees of speculation, from short-term ones, such as enquiring which type of wearable artifacts will be needed in the pandemic and post-pandemic world or the future of sports activities—to more radical and visionary ones, such as flooded worlds where people will have to live underwater, or outer space exploration.
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