Wetsuit Dress
To adapt to the regular intervals of flash floods that occur throughout every day, the Formalwear dress that turns into a wetsuit, created after workwear and casual wear, enables the user to change from regular apparel to a complete wetsuit, significantly increasing a wearers chances of survival in cold water. After required practice, the change can be made in under the 4-minute Government guideline and eliminates the previous need to carry around or squeeze into or out of a wetsuit.
Inspired by Hussein Chalayan's Afterwords, the dress turns into a wetsuit and vice versa, without either of its forms giving away its hidden alternative form.
Fwellingtons
Another flood defending object, the ‘JMEL Fwellington’ are quite simply; Wellies with fins. Footwear that allows the user to switch from regular wellies to fins in a matter of seconds, allowing the unsuspecting wearer to tread easily in deep floodwaters should they get caught, preserving energy and allowing more time to be rescued.
Wind Hood
To protect against the extreme wind, is a hood protector, implemented by the government to wear when a ‘Wind Hood Warning’ is issued by the MET office, in occasions where going outside in these conditions cannot be avoided. The hood is worn either on the head or on the back, extending and retracting manually. It is pulled downwards to protect the front of the body when wind powered warning sirens sound at speeds of over 60mph.
Alone it is designed to be worn with the users back against a stable object such as the wall of a building, when worn in company of others, it can be used in various arrangements, to protect a group from multiple angles.
Description
These designs are for everyone and no one, with the intention that the identification of a potential for such objects should prevent their future existence.
In order to contextualise and convey the reality of the objects existences, each object has been appropriated to a familiar TV format, with an edge of satire, taking on the idea of parody, inspired by the playwrite Bertolt Brechts ‘verfremdungseffekt’. This particular technique of ‘spass’ engages the audience through humour, creating a more tangible reality and making them think.
The authenticity of the familiar ‘selling techniques’ and ‘productising’ of the objects, is contrary to Dunne & Raby’s belief for speculation to ‘decouple design from the marketplace’. It is intentionally left coupled, with its sexy and consumable language acting as a critique on a neo-liberal treatment of climate change, contrasting the traditional media handling of serious political issues such as these. By taking the Brechtian technique of satire and applying it to design, it opens the opportunity for speculative design, which often lacks the ability to connect the probable/preferable/ plausible or possible ‘future’ to the ‘now’, to become more engaging for the viewer, without losing its serious values, if not gaining more impact when the audience questions their laughter to reveal the truth behind.
There are limitations to this technique’s comprehension across cultures, but in order to make the relationship between the viewer and the potential future stronger and more compelling, we can take calculated risks in learning from the worlds of marketing and advertising, and use our specific cultural capital as a way to leverage engagement and spark debates over contemporary issues.
The complete collection of objects designed throughout the project have been collated into a ‘JML’ style catalogue, in order to construct a more comprehensive world. Together they create a HD fictional world, and show how this model of design could be taken further. The techniques applied have the potential to be used as ‘engagement vehicles’ to other serious issues, being careful to take limitations into account. As purveyors of cross-disciplinary practice, bringing speculative design together with theatrical techniques to create new narratives, means that viewer engagement can probably/preferably/plausibly/possibly be more effective.
