‘Eva Biodesign Lab’ by Carlos Silveira
BA Visual Design (2016-21)
Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM), Porto Alegre, Brazil
Key supervisors: Fernando Bakos
keywords: Science Fiction, Pandemic, Experience Design, Speculative Design, Virtual Reality, Biodesign, Metaverse, Futures Thinking
The project approaches the launch of Eva Biodesign Lab, a company that aims to develop technological surfaces using biomimicry and biocomputational design in the Brazilian market. To present the business to potential investors, an experience was elaborated to present the company in a fictional story that speculates a technology that represents the capabilities of biodesign in a relevant theme in today's society and culture, the current and future pandemics. In order to tangibilize this project, the designer considered the use of technologies that would provide the guests an immersive and multisensory experience through the concept of metaverse, mixing the physical and the digital.
The idea of the project is based on a fictional time travel story, when three potential customers are invited by a scientist of the year 2032 to participate in a mission to save humanity, where a deadly virus devastated almost the entire human race. The customers will be taken to a portal that will transport them to a laboratory in the future to retrieve a technology and apply it into their present to stop the catastrophe. However, since they are not familiar with the field of biodesign, they must learn to choose elements inspired by nature to extract the technology before they get hit by the pathogens. When brought the to the present, the participants will discover that the technology is a project idealized by the Eva Biodesign Lab company to invite them to build a better future through the field of biodesign.
In the development process, first a technological surface was speculated by the biomimicry methodology, which unites the pointed structures present in the cicadas' wings with the Voronoi pattern and the bioplastic made of algae to be applied in a pair of gloves, a car seat and a veil. Next, a fictional story was elaborated to introduce the speculated technology, the company and the field of biodesign, and then a narrative-interactive space was developed to represent the laboratory of the future in which the guests should extract the technology to complete their mission. As a result, we obtained a detailed script of the story and a video simulation of the digital space that can be viewed through virtual reality glasses (VR).
The importance of the project reflects on how design can be used to speculate possible solutions for the future in order to promote a new area that aims to develop technologies that represent a new path for the evolution of humanity inspired by nature. In this way, the idealized experiment represents how we can imagine another version of the pandemic scenario and how design is responsible for promoting innovation in society. However, it is important to emphasize that is not about the technologies utilized to materialize the project, but how they were used to incorporate a perspective of our world that is not yet reality, but of possible existence.
Carlos Silveira / BA Visual Design / ESPM / 2016-21
From Erechim and based in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, i am 24 years old and seek to develop myself in areas that relate design, science and technology, such as biodesign, speculative and experience design to elaborate news ways to think and imagine humanity evolution by nature's genius.
