Made in Sweden

PART SP-17

After bees became extinct in 2012 (the end of the Mayan Calendar), the future of flora has become uncertain. Many species have since become extinct, but other persist in labs through carefully monitored conditions and specialized nutrient diets.

Sinewaves of a very specific wavelength have been found to be an incredible pollinating alternative, but their effect on humans continues to be tested before the method receives approval.

Somehow some of these devices fell in our lap before approval. Be careful!

The Umeå Institute of Design, a top Swedish design school, recently held its Spring Summit 02009 on the theme Sensing And Sensuality. Students in the Interaction Design (IxD) graduate program there created some charming artifacts from the future as souvenirs for Summit speakers, which included such luminaries as Matt Jones and Adam Greenfield.

Kluged together from what look like pieces of decommissioned VCRs and other electronics, the wittily improbable stories accompanying these objects may tend to push them past design fiction, and towards what at first I mistook for design fantasy...

PART DMP-87

OLRs (Organic Living Robots) need maintenance too, but you well know they don’t like it.

Use a DMP to tranquilize them and stunt all cellular respiration momentarily so you can perform maintenance on them without being inflicted harm upon.

The Paralysis starts 3 minutes after exposure and lasts exactly 57 minutes. A more potent dosage unit is in the works.

PART BIS-003

The proliferation of Blue-Ray DVDs led to the Blue Ray Catastrophe of 2015. How amazing that we humans hadn’t figured out that blue light causes retinal cancer!

The blue light leaks that led to that event were a wakeup call. You think you are safe now with blue light filters in all public and private environments.

Surely if you are reading this, you are an explorer of outlying territories. For that you will need this device if you treasure your vision.

This batch comes from a commando of new-era Brazilian territory surveyors.

PART NGP-9

Laboratory reproduction has rendered gender an unnecessary disturbance.

It’s well-known that gender-positive humans still roam the earth. Gender Neutralizers are to be used on their nature-induced newborns after capture and during incubation.

Not to be used on infants over 7 months of age.

But rather than design fantasy, or even critical design, for me these artifacts instead present as design parody.  Calling to mind the late science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", these pieces joke about the mysterious, near-dysfunctional lack of legibility in advanced industrial design.

Being pieced together from found components, they also seem to deploy a 3d version of future-framing, because it's not their design per se that's at the heart of these objects, but the new mini-stories which accompany them. It's the refurbished backstory, the newly futurised context, the soul transplant via narrative, that brings them to life.

Related posts:
> Future-framing images
> The MacGuffin Library

> Design fiction is a fact

> Human Lust Inducing Virus

> Feel that sting?

(Thanks Jake!)

Feel that sting?

That's pride, f**kin witchoo.

Image: Guardian Books

A world without bees...

Today I glimpsed an advertisement for this in the Guardian's Saturday magazine, Weekend [print p. 54], and wondered: some lame entomological ripoff of The World Without Us?

Guess again.

Jane McGonigal's next alternate reality game? (ilovebees + World Without Oil = ?)

Nope.

In fact, it's no hypothetical entertainment, but a sort of latter-day Silent Spring, published in Britain last month, which sounds the alarm on a very real ecological crisis in the making.

A Guardian article by the book's co-author, Alison Benjamin, explains:

Since [November 02006], close on two million colonies of honeybees across the US have been wiped out. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD), is also thought to have claimed the lives of billions of honeybees around the world. In Taiwan, 10 million honeybees were reported to have disappeared in just two weeks, and throughout Europe honeybees are in peril.
...
UK farming minister Lord Rooker [...] warned last year that honeybees are in acute danger: "If nothing is done about it, the honeybee population could be wiped out in 10 years," he said. Last month, he launched a consultation on a national strategy to improve and protect honeybee health.

People's initial response to the idea of a bee-less world is often either, "That's a shame, I'll have no honey to spread on my toast" or, "Good - one less insect that can sting me." In fact, honeybees are vital for the pollination of around 90 crops worldwide. In addition to almonds, most fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds are dependent on honeybees. Crops that are used as cattle and pig feed also rely on honeybee pollination, as does the cotton plant. So if all the honeybees disappeared, we would have to switch our diet to cereals and grain, and give our wardrobes a drastic makeover.

According to Albert Einstein, our very existence is inextricably linked to bees - he is reputed to have said: "If the bee disappears off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."

Bees are a barometer of what man is doing to the environment, say beekeepers; the canary in the coalmine. Just as animals behave weirdly before an earthquake or a hurricane, cowering in a corner or howling in the wind, so the silent, empty hives are a harbinger of a looming ecological crisis. But what is causing them to vanish - pesticides, parasites, pests, viruses? No one knows for sure.

~Alison Benjamin, "Last flight of the honeybee?", The Guardian, 31 May 02008.

These culprits are considered in turn, and the interlocking factors of monoculture (both the crops and the honeybees used to pollinate them), vulnerability to disease, chemical interference in biological processes, and overwork -- that's right, overwork -- amount to a pretty grim picture.

One thing I'd never thought about or realised before is quite how reliant agricultural industry is on the services of honeybees, for far more than just honey. The article notes, "In 2007, honey production was worth $160m to the US economy, compared with pollination services that have been estimated at $15bn."

The industrial-age model of production, and its ideological counterpart, the conception of nature as a machine, are still very much with us. And with those come systemic weaknesses, threats to our survival, in a renovated global ecology that we have barely begun to understand.

I'd certainly recommend the full article; the book is probably worth a look too. You may also like to read this: Jim Dator, 02002, "Assuming 'responsibility for our rose'".