Felicia Renelus
Having a passion for speculative design, my team wanted to start our process for this project by building this future world we imagine our organ in. We had been learning about future forecasting and using weak signals (current events or phenomena) to help project future realities. Being based in the Bay Area, housing and food insecurity are current weak signals that might only get progressively worse in the future due to the price increase of living in the Bay as a result of things like gentrification. California as a whole also experiences various climate crises in terms of natural disasters like wild fires and earthquakes, but also the declining quality of its air. These weak signals all indicate the potential difficulties many people in the Bay might face 100+ years from now (if we even get to live that long.) Since organs have such specific functions, what if organs we thought weren’t as necessary, vestigal, or discarded after a certain use were actual vital to sustaining life in the long term? To further understand the world we were going to be designing in, we created a storyboard of how this placenta might be used.
Since silicone was the main medium used for this project, we also wanted to explore how we would add other layers to this material. We experimented with adding textiles, thermochromatic powder, conductive paint and conductive thread.
The textiles added fun textures to the organ, but ultimately were more difficult to incorporate. What really stood out to us though was how well the thermorcharomtic powder worked. In the first image, the middle sample is a solid piece of silicone that was mixed with the blue thermochromatic powder. In the second image, the blue to brown gradient is the original blue sample after it had been rubbed in a person’s hands. The heat from the hands caused the silicone to change color. This provided inspiration to us as to how we could incorporate color changes to our placenta as fake blood would flow through it. With this idea we then experimented with adding tubing into the silicone and allowing water to flow through it.
We decided that we wanted to stick with thermochromatic powder and tubing to include in the silicone structure. We also decided that we did not want to 3D print a form for the placenta shape because we wanted to make it more organic and natural, so instead we experimented with layering on silicone, curing it and adding more layers onto a chocolate egg mold to get a more natural shape. This method provided the best shape for our placenta and allowed us to incorporate the tubing to have blood pass through it. The blood was just dyed blue hot water that turned the placenta from brown to bright pink. Incorpororating the soft robotics aspect to this project, we used Arduino and an air pump to make the placenta come alive by creating a breathing feature for the placenta.
