Heirlooms as Something Designable
Heirlooms are personal artefacts passed down for generations. Each person's collection of heirlooms are uniquely curated by the predecessor and inheritors.
Technology often becomes unusable with the passing of time. Heirlooms are inherently personal artefacts, and throughout our process we have regarded them as such. They are artefacts, which are appropriated through use and assigned meaning through context. This need for personal appropriation forces us to question whether heirlooms are designable, since seemingly anything can become a meaningful heirloom.
We chose to explore this through speculative design. Our end goal was to uncover the essence of heirlooms and study their nature, rather than actively trying to make a meaningful heirloom artefact.
We found the contrast between the sensory, bodily and very human nature of heirlooms and our task of creating a technological heirloom inspiring. We wanted to play with this contrast in our technological artefact ÅND by incorporating the body.
The concept of ÅND, is a mask which allows the user to "capture" their last breath. Afterwards the breath get distilled into an essential oil which the relatives of the deceased can then inherent as a heirloom.
This concept encapsulated our most important critiques. ÅND came to criticize the following: The disruption of intimate moments. The need to be immortal. Mass production of heirlooms.
To emphasize the critique we wished to convey with ÅND and help immerse and engage the viewers, the world around ÅND had to be shaped.
Design fiction
To bring this future universe convincingly to life we were inspired by how Coulton [2018] created a Design Fiction around the smart IoT kettle Polly. Similarly, we wanted to design a world where ÅND makes sense as a product, we designed several of what Coulton calls “entry points” into our design world.
Website
Drawing inspiration from both cryonics and hospice websites, we created our website. Alongside a background story for our company, extravagant titles for ourselves, ability to buy the product and stating our essential oils were FDA approved for trustworthiness. We created three different kits to be sold, which allows users to decide what legacy they want to leave behind.
Video
The video welcomes the user into our world and set the tone of its grand narcissism. Taking inspiration from car advertisement, the goal of the video was to invoke an image of legacy worth preserving, while always tipping towards uncanny. The use of stock footage and a text-to-speech voiceover with an AI-enhanced script, makes the uncanny elements explicit, a choice made to make the viewer understand the speculative aspect of the concept, and provoke discussion.
Material exploration
In order to tell our story we knew we needed our physical mask to fit into our design fiction. The physical shape of our ÅND mask was dictated by our material exploration.
