Faraday chair
Speculative design always questions by many designers, because it always brings out problems, not the solutions. I feel speculative design is more like art rather than design. However, speculative design has potential to picture the dystopia and provide critical thinking. The designer will build the future scenario and the object to support the design fiction, which provides a more vivid visual or physical experience for people to relate themselves.
The Faraday chair, done by Dunne & Raby is 1995, is the future furniture design, which could offer people psychological comfort by providing sanctuary. The design concept is aim at reconstructing a womblike environment that could block the electrical waves and provide a place for people healing themselves and stay away from the real world. The chair creates a utopian and peaceful future interior scenario.
However, the closed chamber could see as a tomb or the tube baby in the lab which implicates the restriction and collective control. The main feature, blocking the electrical waves, is to provide mental comfort, but it just like shut down people’s sensory, and feed the stimulation by control. The Faraday chair could see as the “television” in Hunger game, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984; it is the symbol of mass media, that government or stakeholders use for feeding the sensory placebo to the public, which could paralyze people’s mind and control their thought.
