TF/21-22
Projects supported in 2021-22.
Mobile Territories explores the affordances of the city and how we exist within it. The project is a new speculative park, The Green: a connected network of portable park patches, made of tufted carpet, that function as mobile territories. A tool for spatial claim and appropriation, the park patch gives the public agency in an increasingly privatised environment and interrogates the concepts of pseudo public space, occupation and land ownership.
Mobile Territories alters the visual language and material engagement of the city. The paved cityscape is transformed into a green tufted expanse, materialising a speculative landscape. An abstract territory which exists in scale but not in form; the tufted park patch is a transient layer of objection - an act of domestication and nomadic settlement over the area on which it resides. By claiming square footage, taking up space becomes a way of taking control of space.
The Tom Fund was instrumental in materialising my project concept. With the support of the fund, I was able to acquire the tools and materials needed to begin tufting and creating the tufted park patches that I had envisioned. It enabled me to fully explore a new skill and I greatly appreciate the confidence that this freedom gave.
Amplified Agencies started with my care for natural agencies around us such as the wind, the river, light and sound. There is a tendency to think of the human species as something that exists separate from the natural world, and that these agencies have some kind of dependency on humans. The design of our world is oriented around humans and rejects the input of other invisible agents.
Amplified Agencies: Wind focuses solely on the agency of the wind. To begin to address my concerns and improve awareness of this force, I have designed two hairy objects to be installed in an indoor space. Each is connected to a different wind speed sensor, one indoors and one outdoors. When the sensor outside picks up any wind, its corresponding hairy object will flick, mimicking wind swept hair and reminding you of the wind. The sensor inside can be blown on to match the outdoor wind speed to achieve movement in the second hairy object.
This object provides a way to see the wind's ongoing relationship with us humans. At the moment of its highlighted presence, mimicking wind movement does not merely represent its presence but materialises and accumulates our relations. I am reflecting on my concern for how the wind performs and acts in the human-oriented design structure of the world.
The Tom Fund has provided me with financial support to buy the necessary equipments including 4 wind sensors, and magnets to materialise my speculation and make real of my project. In addition, I was able to explore the invisible force of the wind from a different perspective and push my project to a new level. to materialise my speculation and make real of my project.
RE/CLAIM challenges top-down urban development, and explores an alternative method of urban design based on collective use, allowing spaces to be designed from the bottom up. By placing these interventional objects on the street, I have allowed the people of Lewisham to design their built environment, giving agency of the space to the user. Using a simple design language and complementary colours, I designed the blocks to be visually engaging and invite interaction while being intentionally ambiguous. I didn’t want to lead the user towards a particular use case or scenario, I wanted to leave it up to them. My intention with the interventional objects is to set a precedent for what public space can be, I have given these objects over to the public realm, with no strings attached, to facilitate spontaneous creativity and a sense of belonging and attachment to the city.
I used the Tom Fund to build my interventional objects and deliver them to my chosen locations. It was very helpful especially with the price of plywood rocketing up in recent months and my own circumstances meaning I couldn’t fund myself through alternative means.
cM(Chinese Medicine) Donald's reimagines the McDonald's franchise through the speculative, counter-historical lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM). The Opium Wars act as turnaround points in the counterfactual timeline. This speculative design project aims to embody the concept of "food remedy" from TCM and other practices in Chinese culture (such as Feng Shui, Qi, etc. )
In my project, McDonald's shifts from a restaurant that represents efficiency, calculability, and predictability to a place where people seek "Qi", balancing the quality of vital energy and pursuing every individual's compatibility with food. The project reimagines fast food through the TCM belief system by bringing a non-Western perspective to re-examine the relationship between food, medicine and our health. Meanwhile, this project utilises the fast food restaurant as the vehicle to question our bodies' relationships with the food whilst considering Western norms and dominance in the world.
The Tom Fund made it possible for me to develop a series of fictional artefacts, enabling me to test various materials to find out what would be best suited for my diegetic prototypes. The Tom Fund was hugely valuable to help push my project forward and open up more possibilities for this project.
Within my project, Setting the Subconscious, I have been exploring how we can reconstruct parts of people’s dreams collectively, from the night of March 21st 2022, through set design. The project's focus has been looking at the surreal and irrational qualities of dreams, and how by giving our subconscious a platform within design it can begin to shape the tangible, material world around us, and liberate us, especially us as designers, from rationality.
There were four stages involved in the experiment:
Stage 1: Dream Reenactment Collection Data - where the dreams were collected.
Stage 2: Dream Reenactment Organisation Categories - where the dreams were sectioned into different categories (sound, actions, settings, objects, and script).
Stage 3: Collective Dream Reenactment - this is where the participants reenacted their dreams collectively.
Stage 4: Collective Dream Object Reintegration - where each participant took an object from only their dream home, to re-integrate their subconscious concept into a physical object that can then become conscious.
The Tom Fund helped me to create all the objects and props for the set in which the participants explored and reenacted their dreams.
“In the distant future, fragments of objects are unearthed by archaeologists at an array of Anthropocene-era sites around what was once London. Strange relics of unclear purpose, the artifacts are interpreted and “remembered” using Machine Learning. In a future log entry, an archaeologist catalogues them in a digital archive and speculates about their provenance. As the archivist inventories the artifacts, we learn the context of their discovery and the material story of their preservation, and a future “memory” of their original purpose.“
I used the Tom fund to aid in the production of my thesis project as part of the 2022 design degree show. This project aims to prompt a conversation about our current waste culture. The concept behind it was a future archive display presented by a post-human archeological society as well as a film. The objects displayed, alongside their fictional provenance, were meant to have been unearthed in the ruins of our self-destructive consumerist society.
The Tom Fund’s support allowed me to purchase machine learning experiments to produce the images for the film. I also used the funds to purchase mold-making materials, and materials for object production and for the construction of the display case.
See the film of the project here.