EGOTECH
A critical design project
Egotech is a fictional corporate entity that exists in the year 2035. It addresses a population with a digitally augmented brain, and provides them with a starter pack as newly hybrid humans.
1. Research
Speculative design means designing for how things could be, rather than how they are now.
It can be used, as is the case of this project, as a medium to counter the complacency created by techno-utopianism (in reference to Dunne & Raby's Speculative Everything (2013).
2. The Starter Kit
The starter kit is destined for newly hybrid humans, i.e. those who have just to undergone the process of augmenting their brain through digital devices. Since the process is equivalent to a surgery, with physical manifestations and a recovery period, the kit acts as first aid kit for the aftermath of the operation. This dystopian approach is grounded in the physicality and the rawness of the human body, to make us reassess our growing proximity with our digital -and implantable- devices.
Documentation of the making of the starter kit,
2. The digital platforms
Egotech launched a website and a mobile application
that introduce the consumer to the Starter Kit and that
provide a detailed glossary of its components. As the digital implants are equipped with wireless technology, the material from the person's wetware (brain) is remotely uploaded daily and in real-time onto the cloud. Egotech suggests plug-ins that the consumer might like based on the results of specific algorithms, tackling the controversial
notion of constructed identities.