Guilty Pleasures

The last year has been rough for relationships. While distancing dominated the social ones, our apartment has seen us as much as never before, and we would sometimes need some distance. But we can still be friends.

To re-evaluate the relationship to our most direct surroundings, we will look at them from a greater distance. The screen you are reading on, the phone you already twice got distracted with, the chair you sit on and the casual pants you sit in have come a long way before they started entering your everyday. And a long way to go, when you finally decide to lay them to rest. Our homes are just one of many architectures, our property is about to see in its lifetime. We want to trace back our household’s stories to the very beginning. How many miles has my phone traveled to reach me? What does the home of a lithium-field worker in Bolivia look like, and how the dorms of Foxconn-factory workers? How big are these factories and how big is my footprint?
What is the physical consequence of the supply-chain to our everyday-life and how big is the city that builds everything we own, if it was all in one place? Considering everything we learn, how guilty are the pleasures we fill our lives with? We want to elaborate on this, exploring data visualization methods.

PLUS

As part of our design fiction-module, this intense research is the first and essential part of a speculative design, that is to be pursued in the mAD summer speculation workshop. To make up alternative solutions for the support structure of our lives, we will examine the history and practice of design fiction and future making.

mAD Media Drill:

Essential to succeed in this seminar are the contents of the mAD media drill, providing you with know-how on workflows in Photoshop, Illustrator, Rhino, Grasshopper and V-Ray, across all of our seminars and projects. Over the course of two intense weeks at the start of the semester, the mAD-Team will refresh and improve your software-skills, combined with you training content creation on class-specific research.