#distributed design #speculative design #emerging technologies #biohacking innovation
(de)Futuribles: There Is No Future Unless You Project It
Vanessa Lorenzo Toquero, also known as Hybridoa, is a product design engineer and a transdisciplinary researcher in the fields of science, art, and technology. (de)Futuribles is a strategy aimed at envisioning desirable or alternative futures, designed for professionals in design and innovation. It employs emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and bionics, along with storytelling and rapid prototyping strategies. The goal is to introduce critical speculative design to explore the social and cultural repercussions of technology.
Technological innovations often lead us to dystopian or fantastical futures, tied to a science fiction imaginary or to highly specialised and complex environments that are difficult to understand. However, emerging technologies have a significant impact on social, political, and cultural levels. Therefore, the future built upon these technologies should be designed by diverse profiles in an open way, ensuring it broadly meets society’s needs.
The (de)Futuribles initiative, led by Vanessa Lorenzo, aims to foster design processes based on open science and the maker philosophy to awaken critical thinking and bring emerging technologies closer to creative profiles. “The intention is to introduce critical speculative design to explore the social repercussions of emerging technologies,” explains the researcher. “The maker concept is closely linked to socialising knowledge, connecting with people who have access to various fields of expertise, and making complex technologies more accessible to imagine, discuss, and project.”
Within the Distributed Design framework and the programme of the Maker Faire Bilbao festival, Vanessa Lorenzo designed the (de)Futuribles Bio+AI workshop. This activity combines open science, speculative design, and rapid prototyping, utilising emerging technologies like AI and bionics to create biocompatible prostheses. The workshop incorporates biohacking, gamification techniques, audiovisual storytelling, and tools like 3D scanning and #LoFi rapid prototyping (brikospeed). With this focus on biohacking and human prostheses, the researcher seeks to stimulate experimentation in this broad field.
“Biohacking involves replicating laboratory techniques at home, in your studio, opening up codes and protocols to experiment with solutions applicable to biomaterials, soft robotics, and many other fields,” she explains.
The workshop is conducted practically, with artificial intelligence used in both the ideation phase—opening up possibilities and unblocking moments of creative stagnation—and in storytelling, for the creation of designs. It also serves as a tool for developing disruptive solutions: “you could design a prosthesis capable of learning from your movements and needs, for example.” Nevertheless, one of the workshop’s main pillars is the prototyping phase, as the goal is to create a physical device, not just remain in the ideation stage.
As highlighted by the engineer and researcher, these workshops aim to include profiles from design, art, and creativity as innovative agents capable of influencing the direction of emerging technologies. “If we don’t participate in the design of technologies, if these processes are not opened up, decision-making will fall to big tech companies,” says Lorenzo. “Even if what we design diverges from reality, we’re creating a dialogue, a conversation that democratises access to technology and helps us envision the futures we do and don’t want to be part of.”
