YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/BIYaGfsS-cQ
Speculative Design
Chosen Scenario: Constraint - Germ Pods
Chosen Generation: My kids in their age of 40's
What are our moral obligations to others? Who should we trust? What are the limits of this trust? What precautions do we need to take to protect ourselves, our loved ones and the people we will never meet? I’m Jiaying, and I will present to you about my speculative design solution. The purpose of this speculative design is to predict what the future will be looked like in a post-pandemic world, and how this design will influence on people around world.
The potential future Constraint scenario called “Germ Pod” has been chosen from The Institution For The Future to be main focus point - as it's a problem that the world will be facing in the next fifty years. Germ pods values health and works toward leveraging testing and contact tracing. Although, Germ pod has already existed today, but it is more likely will be occurring in the next fifty years again, and with a wider range of Covid-19 virus cases appears around the world.
Furthermore, to assist the prediction, I have created a persona, with a chosen generation – design for my children that will be in their 40s. Her name is Richard Anderson, age of 38. Her family background is that she is the only child and the parent, both her mum and dad do manual work at the factory location to earn money, while the Richard does a part-time job and part-time study. Richard is a student that is still studying Master of Education degree at QUT, her major is science, while she also works in teaching team at Mansfield State High School, teaching senior science. Her goals is to be a great science teacher and wants to interact with her students more and cultivate relationships with kids, and to inspire her students to find the love of science. She has an extreme interest in science and teaching kids about science. Richard's fear would be getting a serious illness or disease that may lead to death and be not able to do work or study anymore.
Due to the identified situation of the Novel coronavirus epidemic, a large number of cases has increased around everywhere, and she is afraid of being infected when she goes to the public area, especially in the crowded area. At the same time, she cannot contact and communicate with students and colleagues. Due to this situation, we all know that coronavirus sometimes occurs with no symptoms showing on people, and we never know who's already infected. Therefore, the aim of this design is to be achieve the capability that allows Richard to be able to go back to work, keeps in a safe interactions and communications with kids and her colleagues.
Upon on the problem that Richard could not go back to her daily routine and to have a closer collaborate with her teaching teammates and interaction with her students. To solve this problem, I have developed three prototype solutions.
The first solution, I will show you is “Isolation Umbrella”, this product is conducted with normal umbrella, and hang with plastic protection curtain. This provides a self-protection in the individual personal space, and with the length of the umbrella, it keeps a social distance of 1.5m away when standing next to another person. At the same time, the idea of the plastic protection curtain is to help to prevent the droplet transmission, and also avoids the contact between people in the body and reduces the chance of virus infection.
The second solution is built with a Plastic container backpack, which contains a type of plant inside called chrysanthemums, this plant allows to purify the air. It also provides a long life in the plastic container backpack. The backpack connects to the glass headgear with a pipe. The purpose of the headgear is to avoid droplet spread, and it allows to receive fresh air inside the person to breathe. So, how does this product function? The air from outside will go through the holes into the backpack, the plant will purify the polluted air. Then, the air will transport into the glass headgear through the pipe to be filtered, that removes the virus, bacteria and germs, thus the person can receive fresh air to breathe.
For the final solution, based on this last prototype piece, I have done some research on probable information that may be used in the future. First consideration came up in mind was what type of chemical materials that allows to kill bacteria, virus or germs which can be used in this design solution. As according to the research that QUT scientist has already developed a type of a chemical component that allows to kill the virus within 6 hours - Aluminium alloy with wet etching technology [“ “Nano-pillared” surface traps and kills COVID-19”, 2020] – this chemical component has been decided to be a material that will be made out of in this design piece. This solution will be conducted as a coat combine with hat connected, that will be made out of Aluminium alloy with wet etching technology, with providing a pair of gloves that is also made out with the same material. A “face shield” is provided with connecting it on the hat, it can be known as wearable face protective cover, which is made out of carbon fibre and polyvinyl chloride film – that will be wire embedded in the plastic. The purpose of this protective face cover is to form the ultraviolet radiation network, which can heat up the surface of the cover, and sterilise the interior of the surface of the environment and protect the wearer.
Based on the audience's response, the last design piece is considered as best final design piece – most of them thinks the final design piece has an effective and positive outcome, as it allows to protect ourselves and kills virus. They responded that the second solution would also be an interesting one, but since it doesn't have the functionality to kill the virus, the virus will still be exiting everywhere, which it is a problem.
Overall, this speculative design piece corresponds to the design manifesto “What should design be like in the future?”. As according to the statement from the Design manifesto, it says design is to purposely direct the world to improve people's material and spiritual life and to improve the world. I believe my final design piece would produce a positive outcome and would impact to the world, that would help Richard and everyone to go back to work in a normal daily routine and defeat the virus.
Reference List
“Nano-pillared” surface traps and kills COVID-19. (2020). Queensland University of Technology. https://www.qut.edu.au/research/article?id=169351
JIAYING WANG ( N10797726 )
DYB124 Design Consequences
A2 - Speculative Design
