How central is storytelling when integrating technology into interior spaces? Can technology itself become a narrative medium?
Technology is a tool with an enormous potential to tell good stories, and also to move us. I believe in the use of these new numerical technologies to bring us closer to one another, to humanize and to warm. I have been ardently defending this to my students.
Product design often involves direct physical and emotional proximity to the user. How can technology enhance intimacy, care, and emotional connection with an object instead of disrupting them?
I have a very special project that can help me illustrate an answer. It is called Aura Pendant, a 3D-printed jewellery project. It involves a mobile app where it is possible to tell a love story while the app collects the heartbeat (through the finger positioned over the flash) and analyses the emotion in the tone of voice. From these two inputs, a small mandala is generated in real-time, which can be printed in gold or silver and used as a pendant to be worn close to the heart. Since its creation, we have received numerous very moving feedbacks, such as one from a woman in Brazil who said her therapist suggested the Aura Pendant as a healing ritual for depression following a recent loss. To me, this is design, this is technology, and this is a way of understanding sustainability through its affective potential. An object like this, generated through affection, will certainly have a much longer life cycle.
Your projects often emerge from collaborations between designers, programmers, engineers, scientists, and artists. How does this interdisciplinary process influence the emotional depth and empathy embedded in the final work?
Multidisciplinary is a fundamental pillar of innovation, and it is a truly important part of my work. My most interesting projects involve the collaboration of neuroscientists, psychologists, programmers, and engineers. But a fundamental point in discussing the future of design is the issue of race and diversity. My studio became a much more interesting place, with more in-depth projects, precisely when I began to actively hire people different from me—Black architects, or trans people, for example, who bring another perspective to the world based on life experiences that are different from mine. This is why we speak of pluriversal design, which seeks to recognize the world from different perspectives, different lenses, beyond the Western, Eurocentric, white, binary, patriarchal, and colonizing lens, which has a strong racist, homophobic, and sexist bias.
Opening our creative studios to these other perspectives can take our projects to unimaginable places. Thus, innovation for me comes less from the technology itself, and much more from the power of this union of knowledge. If you are invited to participate in an event about innovation and the future, and all the speakers are white, you can calmly leave, because in that environment, the future will not be discussed with any depth.
