redirecting human enhancement
against artificial autonomy
Within our MA thesis project Florian Adam and I explored the interconnectedness between technology and the human body.
To reroute current developments within body enhancements towards a more empathetic path, we are proposing principles for interdependent interactions to provoke a future that is focused on collective confidence rather than on artificial autonomy.
Read the whole thesis here.
project phases
1. research & clustering
During our initial reading and research, we came across many diverse projects, varying from art and design projects to scientific explorations. We picked 40 projects that deal with the merging of the human body and technology in the most interesting way. To better discuss these fusions of humans and technology we developed different scales of invasiveness and ranked each individual project on them.
2. workshop
Within “The Good Life Workshop” we tried to facilitate a playground where people could take bodily development into their own hands and manufacture as well as discuss what they thought was important and desirable. The main aim of the workshop was to understand people’s ideas of what parts of the human body are enhanceable and in which way or ways they would desire to do so.
3. prototyping
To facilitate discussions about preferable futures of bodily enhancements, we generated provocative prototypes that sketched out different kinds of interdependent interactions testing our hypotheses: "Increasing interdependent interactions will positively reinforce empathic abilities."
4. principles
From the insights we gained during both our prototyping sessions we went on to generate universal principles for the design of interdependent interactions. These principles are for interdependently focused interactions in general and are not limited to the sphere of bodily
enhancement alone.
