Sleepcaster / 1.0
The assignment was to develop a speculative design, so I started combing through emerging technologies that could be expanded on or relocated into a new context. I had come across MIT’s Tangible Media Group’s inFORM project before and felt this would be an interesting technology that may help inform our evolving definition of intimacy in the digital age.
My speculation is taking a inFORM’s reactive cell technology and applying it to an intimate space where the user can transmit and receive live signal representations of human forms. This speculation raises numerous questions in terms of intimacy, safety and personal privacy. Would this satisfy a lonely person’s desire for a comforting human touch? Would we withdraw even further from the physical marketplace of relationships and fulfill our needs with mechanistic reproductions of our most intimate moments?
My first iteration involved a rough physical depiction of a human form rising out of a soft mattress-like surface as well as technical drawings to help illustrate the concept in greater detail.
