Throughout history, the human body and technology co-evolved, generating forms of deep symbiosis that materialized in a vast web of artifacts and prostheses that mediate between individuals and the environment. All wearable products, medical devices, tools, and means of transportation, and the city itself can ultimately be interpreted as an extension of our physical bodies. These technological prostheses increase the chances of survival and expand the human experience.

In the future, abrupt changes in the climate and the ecological crisis will rapidly change the environments in which people live. We can expect a widening of extreme conditions, with changes in the atmosphere’s composition, expanding desertification, and flooding of vast territories.It is then possible to imagine that in the decades and centuries to come, our array of prostheses and body extensions will have to be re-designed to adapt to such fast-changing conditions.

The Body Architecture 2.0 studio workshop aims at anticipating such needs and developing a design agenda that explores and describes emerging opportunities. Moving from identifying a specific trend of climatic change, projects will speculate on transformations of natural and artificial environments and how the human body and its prostheses would react and adapt to such trends. The projects will eventually propose the design of a specific wearable artifact or a vision of a more radical transformation of the human body.

While primed with software and design techniques, participants will form small groups to develop their projects. Research into historical, contemporary, and fictional case studies is highly encouraged, spanning from any gear developed through human history to adapt to aggressive environments to contemporary sportswear and tools for space and deep water exploration to science-fictional examples of body transformation and extension.

The Body Architecture 2.0 studio workshop is flexible to encourage different time scales and degrees of speculation, from shorter-term ones, such as enquiring on which type of wearable artifacts will be needed in the pandemic and post-pandemic world or the future of sports activities, to more radical and visionary ones, from flooded worlds where people will have to live underwater, to outer space exploration.

SESSION 1

Introductive lecture – 1h

Digital representations of the human body – 1h

Computational design techniques – 2h

Assignment 1

SESSION 2

Kick-off lecture – 0.5h

Computational design techniques – 2.5h

Tutorials / project reviews – 1h

Assignment 2

SESSION 3

Kick-off lecture – 0.5h

Computational design techniques – 2.5h

Tutorials / project reviews – 1h

Assignment 3

SESSION 4

Kick-off lecture – 0.5h

Computational design techniques – 1.5h

Tutorials / project reviews – 2h

Assignment 4

SESSION 5

Kick-off lecture – 0.5h

Computational design techniques – 1.5h

Tutorials / project reviews – 2h

Assignment 5

SESSION 6

Kick-off lecture – 0.5h

Computational design techniques – 1.5h

Tutorials / project reviews – 2h

SESSION 7

Final Crit