The weekly development of my prototype was less of an iterative process than it was the complete and repeated reinvention of my concept every studio class. I found myself struggling on two fronts:

The first challenge was consolidating the many objectives that my speculative object was required to fulfil― representing aspects of my scenario’s STEEP breakdown, how the object interacts with the humans who use it, it’s impact across societal classes, its potential use and misuse―all in a way that provokes thought and explores our current experience of technology.

The second challenge was the physical realisation of an artefact that would inevitably be related to our scenario’s focus on biotech, necessitating some form of technology connected to or embedded in the human body. Technologies like supplements, drugs, implants, and prosthesis would be difficult to prototype and body storm as they integrate themselves into the body.

I began exploring designs that existed externally, beginning with a dermal tracking patch and progressing to a cosmetically transformative ‘smart skin’.

Feedback received on my first two prototypes questioned their effectiveness as interventions that revealed our scenario’s social and technological nuances. I believe my designs were too simplistic in scope and impractical in function, which limited my ability to explore the overarching values of our society and their implications for individuals within different socio-economic groups. Even accounting for our scenario’s dystopian prevalence of discrimination and superficiality, cosmetic technologies do not reveal enough about the world’s overall condition to challenge our current social and technological trajectory.

I needed to rethink the key aspects of our scenario. Our scenario’s highly competitive socio-economic hierarchy is a result of the 1977 Anti-Discrimination Act being repealed, no longer protecting principles of anti-discrimination, equal opportunity, and diversity. A narrow and superficial ideal, concerned with a naturally fit physique and organic lifestyle, determines societal and workplace advancement. Contemporary biotech is seen as a tool of the middle and lower classes, an artificial and ugly necessity for those without the time and resources to eat an organic and nutritious diet, and live and exercise in a spacious unpolluted environment. It is a society with a distinct socio-economic hierarchy, revolving around the renouncement, use, and abuse of body-modifying technology.

I concluded that a piece of technology designed to accommodate the demands of everyday living would shed the most light on the behaviours, attitudes, and resources available to different social classes.