Speculating Imaginary Beings, 2021
Imaginary Beings is a series of design artifacts fabricated by MIT professor Neri Oxman and what was once her Mediated Matter Lab, now no longer affiliated with the school. Imaginary Beings takes inspiration from a variety of biological forms, and uses biomimicry to imagine what people may wear in a speculative context.
Each artifact within Imaginary Beings is named after a mythological creature or figure, with many of the names taking inspiration from Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings.
Fig 1. Whole-body view of Gaia
Named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, my speculative redesign of Imaginary Beings created for the DSGN 306 design theory seminar at the University of Pennsylvania builds off of these precedents within Oxman’s body of work.
This piece imagines living lichen growing on a wearable item composed of a breathable biocompound that possesses multiple water-retaining properties. Gaia ultimately inhabits a speculative world in which climate change has made it impossible for humans to live without the help of specialized tools.
Lichen possesses many remarkable properties, including the ability to break down polyester as well as absorb toxic substances. The lichen on the top layer interacts with the wearable item and the algae embedded within it to create a microecosystem completely capable of sustaining itself, and uses the human body and its byproducts as substrates. Within the hollow, water-filled tubes of the suit live a wide variety of aquatic microorganisms such as algae and cyanobacteria, which create food that can be used for both the lichen as well as a wide variety of biochemical processes. The suit also regulates moisture and retains water from bodily products.
And finally, a porous substrate lying in between the lichen and aquatic matrix allows molecules to travel to and from both layers, and acts like a cell membrane would: vital compounds are let through, while toxic substances are filtered out. In this way, Gaia allows for the human body itself to act as an oasis of life in a hostile world covered by scorching deserts.
Fig 2. Close-up view of Gaia
Fig 3. Close-up view of Gaia
Fig 4. Timeline created for Speculating Imaginary Beings
Gaia additionally departs from the rest of Imaginary Beings in that it creates relationships between climate, human, microorganism, and macroorganism, and imagines wearable suits as living entities in and of themselves.
© 2023 Victor Li