A research blog for speculative game design focusing on Animals and Play.
Category: PhD
Artists Anne Cleary & Denis Connolly developed a series of 5 helmets which they titled Meta-Perceptual Helmets, each of these helmets allows the participant to view the world through the eyes of different animals. The helmets created a mixed human/animal perception using lenses and mirror to shape the view of the user. The work is inspired by the vision experiments of George Malcolm Stratton in the early twentieth century who wore ‘upside-down goggles’ for periods of time to explore the plasticity of the brain. The work is part of the art of looking series which explores the viewers position in relation to…
Thwaites, T. (2016) GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human New York: Princeton Architectural Press Goat Man is a design project, and accompanying book by designer Thomas Thwaites. The project gained funding from the Wellcome Trust and uses design as a process to bring the designer closer to another species. The project is broken down into sections in the published book; Soul, Mind, Body, Guts, and Goat Life. As an important piece of speculative design on becoming animal this will be a recurring comparison for the study. I will focus on the chapter discussing the Soul in this post but will…
Birdly was first conceived by media artist Max Rheiner as a Design Research project at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in Switzerland in 2013 and was developed into a product developed alongside the SOMNIACS spin out company. Birdly creates an immersive experience of being a bird flying through the city. The project consists of a bespoke controller for a virtual environment where the players body is augmented using a body controller. The player is strapped in and flaps their arms to control the wings of the bird. The immersion is enhanced with the use of a fan which blasts…