Black Box
A performative design fiction about fortune-telling
#SpeculativeDesign #FortuneTelling #Belief #Food #Arduino
Fall 2018 / Course: Carry-on Manufacturing / Insturctors: Matthew Boyko & Helen Ip
Teammates: Diqing Wu, Qian Zeng
My key roles
concept development, experience design, Arduino prototyping, machine mechanism & recipe experiments
Recognition
Honorable Mention, Emerging Designer Award, PRIMER '19
Sent back by time-traveling alien scientists, "Black Box" is a machine that answers a question about one’s future in an edible cube—they can only receive the message by eating it.
With this design fiction, we intend to ask:
What are the implications of fortune-telling for us today? Is gene-testing and other prediction technologies its new scientistic disguise? What if there is machine that can predict our future 100% correctly?
What are the implications of fortune-telling for us today? Is gene-testing its new scientistic disguise? What if there is machine that can predict our future 100% correctly?
Story
Time-traveling aliens with cubic heads from the future brought a mysterious machine back to Earth, announcing that they are gathering historical data and, in return, will give everyone a peek into their future. For these beings, the square is a symbol of wisdom and divinity. We call them the Cubies; the machine, the "Black Box."
Time-traveling aliens with cubic heads from the future brought a mysterious machine back to Earth, announcing that they are gathering historical data and, in return, will give everyone a peek into their future. For these beings, the square is a symbol of wisdom and divinity. We call them the Cubies; the machine, the "Black Box."
The Cubies live in a society where data is insecure, so they preserve confidential information in edible cubes. The Black Box is one of the machines that can infuse secrets into these information cubes. The message inside can only be accessed by digesting it.
With the help of two Cubies and a human ambassador, each person has a chance to ask the Black Box a question about their future. Visitors write down their name and question on a sheet of paper, which is then inserted into the Black Box. The machine then processes the question, calculates its response, and produces an edible answer in about five minutes. The lucky person can gain a glimpse of their future by eating the answer.
INTENTION
Through this experience of a fictional reality, we pose questions about the fine line between fortune-telling and predictions, at a time when we have a constantly strengthening power to calculate almost anything.
The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi
The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi
Astrology/Constellation
Carol Bolt (1999), The Book of Answers
The project is firstly an inquiry to the cross-time, -regional, and -cultural prevalence of the fortune-telling activity. What are its functions? How is it possibly believable or even valid? Why is it powerful?
Secondly, it also doubts the boundary between fortune-telling and predictions with statistics, when scientism and techno-fetishism might be the modern superstitions.
Design
To bring this fictional scenario to life, the team produced the Black Box and created a participatory, performative experience.
It was built with plywood, tubes, circuits and other materials; we selected outer-space music and created a storytelling video to be played during the show; and we dressed up in cloaks and masks to look like two alien Cubies, as well as a human ambassador who facilitates interactions between the visitors and the machine.
A visitor writes down their name and a question about their future, then places it in the machine. In the following five minutes, the machine processes the information and produces the "answer" (a 1.5-inch cube), which is then given to the visitor. After receiving the question sheet, the machine randomly selects two kinds of liquid of different colors and tastes, from a total of six. We then manually combine these with agar-agar powder, pour the mixture into a cubic mold, and use dry ice to solidify it into jello.
During this process, while the making process is hidden from the visitor, the machine produces light and sound effects to suggest that it is calculating and manufacturing a result. The jello cube, with its random colors, tastes, and patterns, is the "answer"; its meaning is completely open to the visitor's interpretation.
