LIE DETECTOR
Forced on immigrants by the Government
LIE DETECTOR AND PASSPORT
Approach
Speculative design project addresses politics of fear. The designed artifacts consists of a lie detector,functioning as a passport device. The concept inspirited from Sara Ahmed phenomenology theory.
Project Info
Fall 2018 5 weeks
Partners: UID/LNU Sweden • Cooperate partner: Academic • Ongoing on project second stage will launch soon (2021)
Focus: Speculative Design / Norm creativity / Inclusive Design / Performative Design / Norm criticism
What if, governments use and produce fear to form ”we against them” mentality and control the citizens by designing their emotions by power of fear. Government validate their actions and condoms ”the others” by stereotyping certain body type and restricting their mobility. Moreover, the artifact has criticism effect surveillance , living in borders with in the borders. This project tackle into future what would happen if we are not careful.
Speculative design project Fear of politics
Speculative design project addresses the politics of fear. The designed artifact consist of a lie detector, also functioning as passport device. In this fictional dystonia story, the artifact is a tool forcefully implied on middle eastern descendants by the government. The project addresses the norms of power structure, social status, discrimination of race, deformation of the body and deconstruction of what’s beautiful.
What if fiction design story :
SPECULATIVE DESIGN IS COMPACT, MINIMAL,OPEN-SOURCE VISUAL MANIFESTO.
Tool to mark the others
Fear of politics
The reason I wanted to develop a project related to politics of fear and the norm of racism, is based on my personal experience as a male of middle eastern descendant.I face racism quite often especially during border check progress or passing between places and spaces. Last year, I had an event that affected me spiritually and emotionally . The police officer almost had me taken away from the train as an illegal immigrant. Even though I am a EU citizen and I have the right to stay and work in Europe. This event affected me emotionally because the police officer wasn’t paying attention to the fact that I am a EU citizen, he just focused on how my face looked and on the name written in my passport. Even today I feel discouraged to take a picture in a place like an airport or grow a beard. I feel uncomfortable whenever a police officer comes close to me. After that day, I promised myself to develop speculative design whenever I can to reflect my norm criticism and creativity on the related norm.
Emotions by Sara Ahmed
Observe through her practical research that emotions are based on discrimination and separation caused by norms. Such as politics of fear, power of institutions and the power of man, particularly of the white male. Ahmed uses a black woman as a symbol to showcase the discrimination against race and gender happening in the USA in the early 70s and 80s. Secondly, she observed society closely and how it changed after 9/11 events. Afterwards, she conducted research on how emotions affect communities and ideologies, and what kind of emotions were produced under the ideologies such as capitalism or neoliberalism. She concluded that politicians use emotions to create ‘the others’ by working through the signs (media, news, advertisements) on the human body and how these signs was designed and manipulated by politicians, how articulation of message limits possibilities of people. Moreover, she argues, how articulation of message creates a border within the borders for the others living habitat. She mentions emotions exist on the surface of bodies, this emotion creates community. How this relationship between community and linguistic landscape of the nation. She mentioned that emotional problems stop the formation of collectives to rise against the white man. In other words, they can not create their own institutions to stand against the white man. Ahmed’s research displays how states of fear are established, and how fear function as a tool to preserve the body and illustrate and how a person is imprisoned by their own memories, specific event’s in history or certain artifacts designed thought the history.
Norms
As humans we only know what we perceive and experience, we are therefore affected by our physical environment and the affordance of materiality it encompasses. This is referred to as phenomenon. Sara Ahmed argues that the phenomenon we experience is neither neutral nor universal. It is dependent on the body which could be viewed as a tool for experiencing the world. In other words, our body is the ”vehicle” we have for understanding and analyzing the world we are living in. Ahmed uses queer phenomenology in norm creative ways to criticize granted assumptions made by other phenomenology theorist’s. Ahmed uses phenomenology to centralise queer and non-normative way by analyzing the bodily experience.
