Masters in Design– Objects & Furniture
The Carbon Pyramid
Inspired by the “Carbon Billionaires” study by Oxfam, and the book “Civil Resistance” by Erica Chenoweth, I made an interactive model of a pyramid visualising the corrolation between class and carbon footprint using material weight and quality.
Our attentions regarding the climate crisis has been framed by the same people profiting from its destruction.
This has caused most of the discourse surrounding reducing our “climate footprints” to suppress most attempts to centre the role of the wealthy.
The top classes of the pyramid both have the most individual control of how our productions impact us all climatically and socially, but they are also the ones who have been deemed to be the least governable.
I wish to show how the wealthy are the most impactful, and how we all simultaneously have a collective position as their scaffolding by holding essential positions in society. Through supplying new, healthy and capable workers, by educating, maintaining social relations ,and facilitating the practical needs for people to work; such as providing transportation and psychologically and physically stimulating activities.
The undermining of these critical functions in society has lead us to devalue both other workers relationships to production and lives, in addition to our own (and the other way around).
These reinforcements of our beliefs have solidified many as certain truths, which one is required to adhere to as to not be labeled an naive optimist, and therefore not being taken seriously by the realists.
The Papyrus Chair
Made as a response to the AI revolutions use in pushing humans out of the workplace, often purely for the sake of efficiency in profiting, this model of a chair seeks to raise questions about our relationships to production and craft.
I traveled to Uganda to explore some traditional crafts which I could implement in the project. I worked with a weaver at the University of Makerere, and a local weaver, to harvest and purchase materials to explore the possibilities of using basket-weaving techniques.
The design is inspired by “Tulip Chair” by Eero Saarinen, and explores the extreme possibilities of papyrus and banana leaves, which are compostable due to being almost completely unprocessed.
Why do we produce what, and how we produce?
What are the aims of what we produce? and how do these goals for production shape what we produce and how?
And most importantly, how does this shape our wants and needs which further drive demand for a certain direction in production?
We produce far from home because certain work requires it, which causes us to design apartments that facilitate us to meet our basic needs and not much beyond that. Since moving from farms, we become expectant of a certain separation between production and our living. This causes us to consume more, and be reliant on import and the seemingly unavoidable exploitation of people in financially occupied regions. This further deteriorates the climate through the energy required to produce at such a scale, and regardless of the non-profit centred benefits and utility of the products.
Visualising Complex Systems with Objects
Though illustrated visualisations of data are quite common, I had yet to see similar principals of representing time, groups, content and changes of the various parameters in object form. Through a long and non-linear design process I created a conceptual representation of what this could look like.
Why? – The internet has brought us a lot of useful tools, but it has also impacted our interactions with the material world, and consequently each other.
Through experimenting with the concept and the material representation, I used a clay for its historied role in human lives, to imagine an alternative way of conveying very complex information without relying on text and illustrations.
The subject of reinforcement of beliefs, and how they materialise out of them, which further solidifies the truth, that both the other objects deal with in a more concrete manner, became interesting because of how difficult I found it to communicate this to others.
In the book “Thinking in Systems” by Donella H. Meadows, she talks about how it is useful to illustrate our mental models, and that is in many ways what I did.
I want to visualise how we as individuals are parts of larger groups with various qualitites, and how we drag and pull our way by shifting beliefs & actions, unavoidably, through time.