I took Erika Naginski’s ‘Shapes of Utopia’ this spring at the Harvard Design School. For my final project I worked with classmates Rae Pozdro and Jinhui Huang to stage a fake alien invasion of Earth.

Here’s the video:

The 8 blueprints below, supplied by the aliens, illustrate how humans can repurpose existing infrastructure and design new infrastructure to support the process of tooth examination, treatment, extraction and transmission to the moon. The aliens are intentionally vague in their instructions so as not to privilege a certain culture or region. A Rosetta Stone-like translation tablet is also included.

In tracing the history of utopian thinking, we’ve found that most projects have failed because they rely on heavy-handed reform that rejects the rights of the individual. Each instance has incorrectly anticipated that each member of society would ultimately subscribe to a similar brand of altruism as the author and hold common the same communal concerns. Our project seeks to coerce individuals into acting more in line with the common good on their own volition by allowing them the freedom to design their own response to a crisis.

In undergoing the process of sending teeth to the moon, humans will have done many things. They will have established a baseline level of universal health and a global distribution system that reaches everybody — two things that both seem utopian despite the best efforts of the UN and Amazon. They will also have engaged in a universal process of working towards a common goal in which everybody has equal input, a democratic spirit that has long since been lost.

Ultimately, the question we seek to raise is whether a fake alien invasion — both Machiavellian and labor intensive — is necessary to spark a more cohesive community on Earth. Is there perhaps an easier way? We believe that the world is not inherently good or evil, it is only when we begin dividing according to our perceptions, tastes, and objectives and needs that we, as humans, create the classification of good and evil out of natural events. In seeking a division that groups all humans together on the side of ‘good’ we, therefore were mindful of the fact that this could not be done without the inverse, which led to the creation of our imaginary evil.

Our hypothesis is both cynical and optimistic. Cynical in that we claim that the groups we belong to are only as strong as those which they oppose, and optimistic in that we claim that the only thing preventing utopia from emerging on Earth is our perception of who we are with/against. We have not actually created an alien race, merely their shadow.

The only things that prevent humans from living more peacefully are harmoniously are humans themselves. We are merely hyperbolizing a destruction that is already occurring but is very reversible.

If this project is successful, we may have even succeeded in redefining beauty.