Last weekend I enjoyed the final event of the 2022 MA in HCI‘s new graduates at Reichman University. I was particularly proud to see the work of my talented students from the Speculative Design Course, and so, this makes a great opportunity to flaunt: This was the third year that we ran the speculative track, and this time our theme was LOVE. Yes, this crazy little thing. It was a challenging topic – It appears that it takes a lot of mental flexibility to shake our fixed perception about LOVE. During our research, we learned that the familiar concept of romantic love was culturally guided into our minds during the recent history, and is still being enforced by our politics and economic systems.
We looked at Love from various perspectives, each team tried to identify a specific personal or global interest around that theme. Is romantic love as we know it still relevant to our current culture, values and lifestyle? How can we use AI to modify the “goal” of matchmaking? Can we imagine a loveless world? What would such a society will be like? How could relationship be shaped through the blockchain? What could this mean for society? etc.
The students imagined their own speculative worlds, exploring alternative societies, and then designed their speculative services / products accordingly.
Below are images from 3 different projects, showing their diegetic prototypes and a possible scenario as some snapshots of their fictional journey, which may help us in our investigation questioning our possible societies and values.
Check out the course blog, for the full documentation of all the projects and their development process.
Subjective Objects 