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Speculative Design Projects

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Octopus on roller skates (You, Li and Ma, 2024)

Single channel film. 4K. Colour. Stereo sound. Duration: 3:13 min.

Starring

Tianqi Li (Octopus)

Xiaoyang Ma (Shark)

Filming and Editing

Dagyeong You

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This project stimulates speculative thinking about a Post-Norm Society. In particular, the designer envisions a Post-Individualism society as a non-linear, wave-like transformation, challenging the notion that collectivism is the sole solution to the issues faced by individualist societies. Instead, this project proposes a more layered and fluid model that explores alternative futures beyond a simple shift between individualism and collectivism. First, at a macro level, the project establishes a wave-like system that oscillates between individualism and collectivism. Based on this framework, it sets a future scenario in the artist's home region of East Asia, imagining life in a Hyper-Anarchic Individualism era. Drawing upon the region’s geographical features, the scenario depicts a world where rising sea levels and climate change have forced over 30% of human life to take place underwater. In this future, with governments and mass markets having disappeared, individuals must hunt for their own survival. As part of the persona design process, the project explores adaptive survival strategies, focusing particularly on custom garments inspired by marine life to facilitate underwater living.

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Human society, which has long developed under a centrally governed feudal system, began emphasising individualistic values in the modern era. However, faced with pressing environmental crises and various other challenges, the methods of co-habiting and co-organising have started to reappear as the only way to overcome today's challenges. Our society does not progress in a simple linear trajectory from individualism to collectivism or vice versa; rather, it follows a nonlinear and wave-like model of transformation, oscillating between the two.

Post-Individualist Society
: Oscillating model

As environmental crises intensify, resource scarcity will become the new axis of class formation. Citizens will be forced to form groups for survival, taking on the role of gardeners, cultivating and extracting resources in a groupist society. Yet, this cycle does not end here. In the distant future, class distinctions and the very notion of citizenship will dissolve entirely, leading to a state of hyper-anarchic individualism, where all societal structures are dismantled.

This oscillating transformation of society over time can be illustrated through a simple diagram. In its early stages, society was structured around collectivism, where class was determined by lineage, and citizens functioned as mere cogs within the system. As we move into the present, the market economy has taken over as the primary determinant of class, shifting society toward an individualistic system where citizens operate primarily as consumers. But what transformations await in the future?

INDIVIDUALISM

COLLECTIVISM

LINEAGE

- CITIZEN: COG
- COLLECTIVISM

- CITIZEN: CONSUMERISM
- INDIVIDUALISM

MARKET

RESOURCE

- CITIZEN: GARDNER
- GROUPISM

?

- CITIZEN: doesn't exist anymore
- HYPER-ANARCHIC INDIVIDUALISM

This cyclical transformation of society over time can be illustrated through a simple diagram. In its early stages, society was structured around collectivism, where class was determined by lineage, and citizens functioned as mere cogs within the system. As we move into the present, the market economy has taken over as the primary determinant of class, shifting society toward an individualistic system where citizens operate primarily as consumers. But what transformations await in the future?

As environmental crises intensify, resource scarcity will become the new axis of class formation. Citizens will be forced to form groups for survival, taking on the role of gardeners, cultivating and extracting resources in a groupist society. Yet, this cycle does not end here. In the distant future, class distinctions and the very notion of citizenship will dissolve entirely, leading to a state of hyper-anarchic individualism, where all societal structures are dismantled.

INDIVIDUALISM

COLLECTIVISM

LINEAGE

- CITIZEN: COG
- COLLECTIVISM

- CITIZEN: CONSUMERISM
- INDIVIDUALISM

MARKET

RESOURCE

- CITIZEN: GARDNER
- GROUPISM

?

- CITIZEN: doesn't exist anymore
- HYPER-ANARCHIC INDIVIDUALISM

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