I want to live in a world...
Fall 2019 - experience design, participatory designA series of quotes from Carnegie Mellon students about the kinds of futures that they want to live in, projected onto Carnegie Mellon’s campus buildings.
The concept behind this work was to physicalize the internal at large scale, and cause those who stumbled upon the projections to think about the difference between these hopes for the future and the present, and maybe even to consider what it might take to go move towards that future.
I collected responses for this series via a worksheet and google form I handed out to friends and posted on my university’s internal student facebook group with three prompts.
I want to live in a future where...
I want to live in a country where...
I want to live in a world where...
The different prompts I hoped to push participants to think about what they wanted from the future at different scales, from the personal to global.
I got a variety of responses, from the serious (I want to live in a world without borders), to the silly (I want to live in a world where Halloween is year round), to the personal (I want to live in a world where I am in control of my own life), to the existential (I want to live in a future where I still have hope). I curated which ones I wanted to project during the time I had to complete this work, but imagined a version of the project where this could be a continuous effort.
A note on place:
Some of the relationships between buildings and spaces and the words projected onto them were intentional. What does it evoke to project words about mental health onto a school known for its intense work culture, whose motto is literally “my heart is in the work”? What does it evoke to project words about feeling control over your own life into small intimate spaces, and words about the a larger collective future high above the ground?
But for some, I was experimenting on what buildings could be projected on without making the contents of the projections unreadable by way of too many windows and corners. Thank god for brutalist architecture, otherwise this project would have not been very successful!
