Neo-Wellbeing
Nov-Dec 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has great concerns over safety from various perspectives ranging from political governance, confidence in communications, supply lines and business models to human resilience. The Grand Challenge project is a reaction to the current issue; it challenged designers to develop new strategic and applied thinking to tackle complex future problems relating to people and the environment. (RCA Grand Challenge 2020/21: Design For Safety.)
Neo-Wellbeing is a reflection of the current Covid-19 situation when our dependency on technology has been accelerated. As a group, we combined next generation interaction and health, we focused on the impact of the next interaction on human health. As interaction has been aggressively digitalised, it has played a even more crucial role in our lives during the lockdowns, Statistic shows the most popular activity of people in lockdown is watching TV or streaming videos, the way we work or study from home is also highly dependent on technology. Although new interaction technology has brought great opportunities, the side effect of technology is endangering our safety, for instance teleworking is providing efficiency and profit while neglecting individual mental health. Neo-Wellbeing concerns safety issues with mental health brought about by efficiency driven technology. We asked ourselves, as a group of designers, what can we do to ensure safety during ongoing developments?
We ultimately presented a speculative dystopian narrative: we illustrated a world in 2040-2050 in which this trend kept developing, and eventually workers started to accept technological implants in order to improve efficiency. First, we transformed our timeline into a short film, to better bring the audience into the speculative future. Second, our narratives are presented on a community website, in the forms of fake news, manifestos, forums, and more, each with their own meaning. At the end, instead of showing this to the public as a website, we conducted a role-play film to give the audience an immersive experience. In conclusion, the way we cared for safety in this project was through speculating an unsafe future narrative, aiming to raise awareness and discussion around safety concerns related to technology.
Website: https://gcmreshealth.wixsite.com/website
Design Process
Time line
