Future Emergency Project

FUTURE EMERGENCY

Before coming up with a future emergency we started off thinking about what kind of problems we have today.

As science and technology develops rapidly through time the standards of aesthetic perfection has increased and more people are demanding for perfect looks through plastic surgery. So we predicted that maybe in the future rather than changing your appearance through plastic surgery people would start to change their aspects before they are actually born.

But... can this even be possible? Well, according to scientists it is already possible when done by genetic modification. Parents will pick out what and how they want their child to look like, similar to picking out an outfit. After modifying the embryo's genes the child will be born flawless.

RESEARCH (EVIDENCE):

Genetic engineering is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary in the year 2000 as the “scientific alteration of the structure of genetic material in a living organism. It involves the production and use of recombinant DNA.”  Genetic alterations are made by either modifying an organism's own DNA, or by combining it with the DNA of another organism. Until now we have seen genetically modified animals and plants, such as Dolly the Sheep that was cloned in 1997. Also in 1995, the genetic engineer Ward F Odenwald said that he manipulated the genes of male fruit flies to make them 'bisexual' and 'homosexual'.

However the question is, could we be soon dealing with genetically modified humans?

Not long ago, the United States reported to have created the first group of babies to be genetically modified. The scientists announced that 30 babies were born with modified genes. Moreover, two of the babies were found to have the genes from 3 different parents.

Scientists have been working to find out which gene dominates each features of a person. These features includes physical, behavioral and disease-controlling characteristics.

Geneticist claim that in the future "genetic modification methods may be used to eliminate the negative characteristics and replace it with a desired characteristics gene before the child is even born, such as strength or high intelligence". This process is known as genetic screening.

Nowadays parents are able to select the child's gender beforehand, with a rather high accuracy.

According to Doctor Stuart in The British Medical Journal, when scientists are able to modify and eliminate genes in sperm and embryos, they would most likely be able to create “perfect humans” being disease-free and have favorable physical and behavioral characteristics.

FUTURE EMERGENCY:

After deciding our topic to be gene modification we pictured how our future would look like in the extreme case. We assumed that the modification of genes will expand, no longer being a surprising event anymore. Genetic modification alters features that plastic surgery are limited to do such as hair, eye and skin colour and other traits such as shyness, alcoholism, deafness or obesity. Our society will become obsessed with genetic perfection.

Maybe this is what the world might look like if genetic modification took over society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC6ZA1dFkVk

It is a trailer form the movie GATTACA (1997). It is set in a time where society analyzes your genes to determine where you belong in life, including job and with who you have to marry. Therefore while rich people afford money to modify their genes, naturally born babies, like the protagonist Vincent, will be discriminated to have no chance of a career.

For all that, scientists say that 'ordering' a child, as portrayed in the film, is "not very far from today."

PROBLEMS:

We started to look at the various problems that gene modification can cause into more detail.

§  Sex selection.  In places like India and China the discrimination of gender is severe. If sex selection gets real the ratio of men and women will unbalance massively and may cause violence against women

§  Three-parent babies. The creation of “three-parent” embryos, in which the mutated DNA from Mom number 1's egg is replaced with healthy DNA from Mom number 2, which is then fused with Dad’s sperm. This technology could cause all kinds of devastating problems.

§  Sick children. it may be impossible to predict how genetic modification will affect a child until it is born. This means that genetically modified human experiments may lead to very sick children or birth defects

Amongst all the different problems that gene modification creates we wanted to focus on the Discrimination of Genes as we thought to be the most serious case.

There might be a day where only the rich, elite and superior people can afford to genetically perfect children. Rich people would be the ones to afford more money in creating a perfect baby causing them to be more intellectual and therefore richer and an endless cycle of social inequality. In this case people must not be seen as a simple person, but determined and discriminated by their genes like the movie presented earlier.

WARNING BROCHURE:

We thought the best solution to prevent further expansion of genetic modification would be to alarm people about the situation.

We created a brochure in a form of an electronic device because we assumed that in the future there will be a greater reliability of electronic devices than today, therefore it is more approachable to people.

We imagined how people would 'order' a baby in the future, so we showed the stages of a parent ordering and designing their child's through ebay, which is one of the most famous online shopping website. The last slide, which is the stage where you make your pay, we added a mention saying: "Are you sure you want to buy this baby or have a baby?" reassuring the audiences before they make the decision and asking directly to them so they can think for themselves and realize how unnatural and dehumanizing the process is.

REFERENCES:

·         Collins, V., Williamson, R. 2003. “Providing services for families with a genetic condition: A contrast between cystic fibrosis and Down syndrome.” Pediatrics. 112(5):1177. 

·         Derbyshire, S. 2002. “Debating Matters. Designer Babies: Where Should We Draw the Line?” British Medical Journal. 325:974. 

·         GATTACA, screenplay by Andrew Niccol. Released October 1997. Directed by Andrew Niccol. Produced by Danny DeVito. Screenplay written by Andrew Niccol. 

·         Lawler, A. 2003. “Massive DNA identification effort gets under way.” Science. 294(5541):278-279.  Travis, J. 1995. “Bisexual bugs: Added DNA changes Fruit Fly Behavior, Stirs up Controversy.” Science News. 148:13-15. 

·         Wilson, C. 2002. “Ready for your Close-up?” New Scientist. 175:34.

·        http://realizethelies.com/tag/human-genetic-modification/

·        http://www.anh-usa.org/gmo-human-embryos-have-already-been-created/

·        http://www.hgalert.org/

·        https://phil2100dsu12a.wordpress.com

·        http://singularityhub.com/2009/02/25/designer-babies-like-it-or-not-here-they-come/

·        http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-43767/Worlds-GM-babies-born.html

              

PPT: https://app.emaze.com/mypresentations#my
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC6ZA1dFkVk
EMAIL: arin_kim2@hotmail.com

Designing a Public-Private space

GO BACK TO THE PAST

Our main objective for this project was finding the private places in public places with tools from the past.

So we decided to find people located in their mats at Hangang and take polaroid pictures of them.

Target destination: Han River (Hangang- 한강): The Han River is a major river found in South Korea and it is the fourth longest river on the Korean peninsula. Currently the lower parts of Hangang, which crosses through Seoul, the capital of Korea, are lined with pedestrian walkways, bicycle paths, public parks and restaurants. According to a survey conducted by Seoul Development Institute in 2011, 

Hangang is the second most scenic location in the city, after Mount Namsan.

We wanted the public place of our project to be a “hot spot” in the city of Seoul. We considered Hangang to be the few places where both public and private places coexist together. Despite it is a very well-known public place where everyone can have easy access to, many private places are present within the public place. 

Many people tend to go to Hangang to do picnics laying mats or building tents on the park 

and we considered them as private places.

PROJECT- Saturday 18th April 2015

11.00am- We started our journey at Nakseongdae (낙성대)

Our mission was to get to our final destination, Hangang, by subway without getting the help of any electronic devices. We had to find our way just by asking help from people. We asked people who helped us find the way to take pictures of us for evidence. During our 1hour journey we realized that it was quite uncomfortable to communicate with strangers and very hard to not use our smart phones. It was shocking how much we have been relying on our phones and if we had nothing to do our hand naturally got to our phones. Moreover the amount of people looking at their smart phones at the subway caught our attention. Thanks to this project we were able to observe how much people, including us, are depending on electronic devices and realize the importance of interaction with people in our modern society. As a result we came up with a map formed by polaroid showing the locations where we got help from people.

We arrived at Hangang around 1pm. Luckily the day was really sunny and because it was Saturday we found quite a lot of people enjoying their picnics at the park. The majority of the people who went were couples, families and some group of friends. At 2pm we started approaching to people asking if they wanted to take polaroid pictures. We thought that polaroid are appropriate for our project’s objective and a good way to emphasize traditional values. Although it is still an electronic device, polaroid are different to digital cameras because you cannot edit or delete the photograph, therefore it makes it more valuable. At the beginning not many people wanted to take pictures so we struggled a little bit. We could see that most of them just wanted to enjoy their times at their private places and would find it uncomfortable when we went to talk to them. When it got late in the afternoon more people started to participate with us. 

Unfortunately it started raining around 7 pm so we had to finish our project.

We managed to take pictures to 16 groups. Out of 16, 8 where couples, the rest of them where group of friends and a dog. 5 groups were celebrating an anniversary and said that they wanted to take the picture to keep it as a memory. Contradictory to our expectations it was mostly men who were more participative than woman and no families groups wanted to take pictures although there were many of them.

MAKING A PRIVATE PLACE

How can a mat and a polaroid picture be a private place? 

Firstly we related a private place with a squared shape.

Square: In geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral, which means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles (90-degree angles, or right angles). It can also be defined as a 

rectangle in which two adjacent sides have equal length.

According to the anthropologist, Angeles Arrien, 

squares represents safety and security and it is always stable in its place without moving around.

 Most of the architectures are squared and if we look around us, 

starting from windows, walls, tables, doors, all electronic devices 

and even the urban planning are all squared. 

Therefore she believes that human feels security and reliability to squared shapes.

References:

• Arrien, A. (1998) Signs of Life: The Five Universal Shapes And How To Use Them, pp. 174-175.

• Macnab, M. (2011) The Key to Make Everything Look Better: Design By Nature.

Hand Made Map

 PPT Map 

 Result of this Project 

POSTER OF TOMORROW

Predicting the future of the Poster

FERROFLUID

:Magnetic liquid that becomes strongly magnetized by in the presence of magnetic field

You can add colors

It is moldable

It can be synchronized digitally or involve audiences to participate moving it around with a magnetic device

• It is not harmful
• Not expensive or difficult to make
• Can be recycled
• Can combine with other medias/substances

MANIFESTO- DON'T BE AFRAID TO SHOW YOUR DEFECTS

MANIFESTO

MANIFESTO

A manifesto is a written statement that declares motives, intentions or views of a person or group.

Manifestos are a powerful catalyst in making a start for a business, work, or life

Here are some examples of my favorite manifestos.

"The Laws of Simplicity" - by John Maeda

His 10 laws for business, design and life are:

1. Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

3. Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.

4. Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.

5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.

6. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.

8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.

9. Failure: Some things can never be made simple.

10. The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright's Manifestos:

1. An honest ego in a healthy body.

2. An eye to see nature.

3. A heart to feel nature.

4. Courage to follow nature.

5. The sense of proportion (humor).

6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work.

7. Fertility of imagination.

8. Capacity for faith and rebellion.

9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance.

10. Instinctive cooperation.

The Myth of Originality and the Joy of Copying (2011)

Throughout the article the writer, Adrian Shaughnessy, claims that there is no such thing as true originality. Thus, an idea that is purely original doesn't exist and it must have come from some other idea, in other words, copied from somewhere or something else.

However our today’s society, especially in the commercial of art and design, originality is very strongly emphasized. This is very much inconsistent considering that commercial is all about communication. Yet if something was said that it is absolutely original it would be impossible for us to recognize it or understand it. He criticizes the way that the modern society is misunderstanding the real intention of ‘copying’.

It is very true that copyright laws must be necessary in order to protect creative producers from their ideas to be stolen by others and prevent every good idea to be endlessly repeated by everyone. Nevertheless, today the understanding of copying has become something more severe. Copying and plagiarism is known to be a crime and something to be felt guilty about it. Customers demands for more and more originality creating an infinite cycle of producing and earning profit and force too much competition. As a consequence of the fear about copyright laws naturally everyone is turned to competitors and rivals and nothing is able to be shared.

Although not much will recognize it but we all do copy. This doesn't mean copying the whole thing directly, but copying the idea and ‘montage’ it. And if this is done with some creativity then something good is created out of it. So, this is how everything is created, by copying. Yet people are trying to rationalize it by saying that it is just a reference and inspiration, not knowing that both are forms of copying. 

Reading 2

"Learning from Las Vegas" - Robert Venturi
“A Skateboarder’s Guide to Architecture or an Architect’s Guide to Skateboarding” - Bobby Young

When I first read both articles, I wasn’t able to understand the context perfectly, and honestly I don’t think I still do. The reason to that was because I have never thought or studied about space design before. However, it was indeed interesting and made me want to know more about it.

What I understood so far about both articles was the importance of signs and symbolism in a space than the architectural form. In the reading “A Skateboarder’s Guide to Architecture or an Architect’s Guide to Skateboarding”, it explains the relationship between form and function, comparing it to the relationship between skateboarding and architecture. He explains that, while a normal person sees the architecture in a form, the skateboarder identifies the architecture on a specific level and in a functional way. Therefore he explains that architects must “create a space that holds the possibility of improvisation by the user”.

In the reading "Learning from Las Vegas", Robert Venturi argues the importance of symbolism of an architecture, rather than the form, in creating spatial relationships. In order to support his argument he provided a study he did in Las Vegas. He describes Las Vegas as a sensation of architectural communication and how the ‘strip’ is an effective communication over space, accomplished through sign. He emphasizes that modern architecture should also see architecture as a symbol in space, rather than architecture.