In Light of the growing trend of home insulation for energy sustainability, this question posed the question: What might we lose by reducing air to a material substance quantified, controlled, and enclosed into regulated bubbles? Following this initial question, the goal of the project eventually evolved to be: Use speculative design to inspire designers to shift from a utilitarian perspective of air as a scientific object to a relational perspective of air as a more-than-human entity.
Desk research and expert interviews created a foundation of knowledge on cultural understandings of air, experiential awareness of air and scientific understandings of air. Posthumanist literature, most notably works by Donna Haraway provided theoretical grounding; and the book Speculative Everything by Dunne and Raby informed the methodological approach.
Ideas from two generative group sessions were used to write eight speculative future scenarios. Of these, one was selected to be developed further. Starting with another generative group session, the speculative future Airflow City was further detailed. This worldbuilding delved into the culture, aesthetics and materiality of the city, developing characters and diegetic stories. More-than-human Agonistic Pluralism emerged as a key subtheme.
The Airologue is an artifact from airflow city that was developed as a concept to be prototyped and evaluated. It is an object used to enable a dialogue between a person’s breath and the surrounding air with the purpose of finding attunement.
The objective of the evaluation was to see if an interaction with the Airologue prototype could help to achieve the perspective shift stated in the project goal. There were a total of 9 participants not including 2 participants from the pilot evaluation. Four were designers, four were non-designers and one was one of the experts interviewed earlier in the project. The evaluation consisted of a survey before and after the interaction, a reflection and an interview.
The evaluation results indicated that the current prototype did not sufficiently help to meet the project goal, the main issue being that what was supposed to feel like a dialogue was still too much a monologue. This is an issue that could be resolved if another iteration of the prototype were to be made, a number of suggested improvements have been documented.
Overall the project has managed to explore our relationship with air through a number of posthumanist themes as well as connecting these themes to concept from political philosophy. The main value of this report is not so much in the final concept as it is in the breadth of the theoretical inquiry explored throughout a carrier bag of different stories.