Tagged collaboration

MERGE is a co-creative experience rooted in communal sitting, interactive games and storytelling. Designed as an interactive exhibit, participants come together to create new constellations and tell original stories in an immersive environment.

This project began as a collaboration with Nadine Khoury, based on our previous thesis-related work. Communal floor-sitting and multiplayer interactive exhibits seemed to go hand in hand. Our initial explorations and sketching led to an interactive experience with four people seated around a large area, collaboratively creating something in the middle. This turned into a literal space (the cosmic kind), with the participants guiding space particles towards each other to co-create constellations.

The interactive experience eventually expanded into a full exhibit, with storytelling and communal sitting at the core. While creating the entire experience was out of scope, the prototype included a fully playable game, a 3D model of the space and an interactive pilot test in the Student Innovation Center.

Process and Background: MERGE: A Collaborative Intervention [PDF]

Our kickoff project in Thesis Prep Studio was a collaboration across cohorts, i.e. between 2nd year and 3rd year MFA students. Gabriella Goldstein and I were challenged with envisioning for a speculative future scenario and designing artifacts from that future.

We focused on a future in which all pollinating insects have gone extinct. Faced with a collapsing ecosystem, humans are faced with a choice: take up the invisible labor previously done by insects or starve to death. How might humans fill in the ecological roles previously assumed by insects?

Our design solution, B-KEEPER, is a Synthetic Pollen Application system for humans. Through continuous manual labor and a handy smartphone app, humans can maintain the delicate ecosystem and enjoy pollinating plants just like before!