As part of my doctoral design project entitled Transformative Speculation of Life Forms and Life Styles: An Ecological Design Approach in the Context of Climate Change, in XIANGVEI I have researched future life forms via speculative designing to again insights into sustainable futures by redirecting human enhancement.
XIANGVEI is a speculative design organ future. The assumption is that future plastic surgery could be design products. XIANGVEI is a kind of sensory enhancement that humans can put different plants into it to produce location-based perfume and understand plants’ language by recognizing plants’ radiation and computation technology. XIANGVEI could be a sensory enhancement to understand the environment more that starts from a speculative and imaginary perfume culture beyond the current human physical ability enhancement of solutionism.
XIANGVEI argues that multi-sensory futures could contribute to long-term sustainability. It took methods such as speculative making, including making prototypes and digital installation and situated contextual studies, including a field study in Florence.
The project has three related parts that are gathered around the work Grown Perfumer: 1) Grown Perfumer: As a wearable, 2) Grown Perfumer: As an experiential installation, and 3) Grown Perfumer: As an invitation to bodily enhancement.
The works are presented and analysed in the following:
Zou, Y. & Morrison, A. (in press 2021). ‘Sharpening anticipatory design senses for sustainable “scentory” futures‘. Futures, 134: online.