It's been a while since I caught up with the activities of Berg; last time I browsed their work I was torn between skepticism and adoration for their Little Printer, but a mention by a friend about their recent Dimensions collaboration with the BBC prompted me to click back on to their website.
However it was something entirely different that caught my eye and probed some questions about the contextual weight of my own research. Clocks for Robots is a speculative product sketch that investigates the way our smartphones have implicated our perceptions of time and place.
By regarding our devices as a set of eyes that can read code within our environments and relay site-specific information back to us, Berg has been exploring the potential of technology to become more seamlessly embedded in the here and now. Rather than sucking us into a virtual limbo that degrades our perception and interaction with our immediate surroundings, Clocks proposes a reassessment of our smartphones to become a bit more human: to see the world not as a camera but as a set of eyes, evaluating the here and now in a way that is more similar to us than by drawing information from satellites and GPS.
The interesting thing that I took from this for my personal research is the importance of environmental factors in changing our experience and interactions with our surroundings, and how external components like clocks and smartphones affect these perceptions. The time and place of an event is akin to the identity of the event, and possibly, the identity of the person we are during that event.
After the successful sequencing of the Human Genome in 2003, the Human Microbiome Project is already underway, attempting to map the entirety of microbial cultures living on human tissue and researching its correlations with human health. Perhaps our personal microbiomes could also be regarded as clocks, stamping our identity specifically within the time and the place of our interactions, giving us a fluctuating bacterial identity that both influences and is influenced by environmental factors, creating a kind of fluid social network of identities. My bacterial profile would certainly look different depending on whether I had just showered, been at the supermarket, shaken somebody's hand, or sat on a toilet. What would it mean to give ourselves bacterial identities? Once again it comes back to the idea of a personal hyper-awareness and interaction with the self.
At any rate I think I've been given a little perspective on the questions I want to ask with this project. It's easy to get carried away with the massive cultural and political implications of synthetic biology, and the ways it's changing how we think about design. Of course it's all relevant, but ultimately I want the realisation of my project to be a bit more personal, and I think the key words in that respect are time and place.
However it was something entirely different that caught my eye and probed some questions about the contextual weight of my own research. Clocks for Robots is a speculative product sketch that investigates the way our smartphones have implicated our perceptions of time and place.
By regarding our devices as a set of eyes that can read code within our environments and relay site-specific information back to us, Berg has been exploring the potential of technology to become more seamlessly embedded in the here and now. Rather than sucking us into a virtual limbo that degrades our perception and interaction with our immediate surroundings, Clocks proposes a reassessment of our smartphones to become a bit more human: to see the world not as a camera but as a set of eyes, evaluating the here and now in a way that is more similar to us than by drawing information from satellites and GPS.
The interesting thing that I took from this for my personal research is the importance of environmental factors in changing our experience and interactions with our surroundings, and how external components like clocks and smartphones affect these perceptions. The time and place of an event is akin to the identity of the event, and possibly, the identity of the person we are during that event.
After the successful sequencing of the Human Genome in 2003, the Human Microbiome Project is already underway, attempting to map the entirety of microbial cultures living on human tissue and researching its correlations with human health. Perhaps our personal microbiomes could also be regarded as clocks, stamping our identity specifically within the time and the place of our interactions, giving us a fluctuating bacterial identity that both influences and is influenced by environmental factors, creating a kind of fluid social network of identities. My bacterial profile would certainly look different depending on whether I had just showered, been at the supermarket, shaken somebody's hand, or sat on a toilet. What would it mean to give ourselves bacterial identities? Once again it comes back to the idea of a personal hyper-awareness and interaction with the self.
At any rate I think I've been given a little perspective on the questions I want to ask with this project. It's easy to get carried away with the massive cultural and political implications of synthetic biology, and the ways it's changing how we think about design. Of course it's all relevant, but ultimately I want the realisation of my project to be a bit more personal, and I think the key words in that respect are time and place.
