Play Lab| Exercise 2: Sideshows/Side effects
Intro
Inspired by Brandon’s Living Buildings post, and an interest in biotech, I decided to explore the concept of ‘what if the things we owned were alive?’
What if the process of moving was actually a process of planting and growing your furniture? What if you planted and cared for your couch, or bed, or table? While this creates a whole future around the furniture industry, what does it do to the culture of consumerism? Does it force a relationship between you and the things you own? Does is further an idea that everything is disposable, or does it promote a sense of attachment and loss to things?
Living Static Structures
What would a future of growing an apartment possbility look like?
Side effects:
Ownership:
Who owns the furniture? (the designer, the geneticist, the store, the biotech firm, you?) What if you are given a plant and you raise it; does it belong to you? If you are responsible for something, is it yours? And further- what kind of effect does this have on our treatment, responsibility, and care for our things? Are we more likely to see our things as alive and carry a sense of care, or are we more likey to treat them with built in expiration dates and fueling our culture of having a constant need to replace things when they don’t exactly fit our needs.
Luxury/Status
Does status become signified by how well you can care for something? Like other things we own, does matience and care create connotions about wealth, being ‘put together’. Does luxury become how well you care for it? What are heirlooms
Sideshows:
What industries/services would spawn off of this?
Furniture designer?
Genetic Lawyers?
Home-gardeners?
Plant Doctors?
Plant euthanizers?
