Speculative design
- 2022

LIVING SARAH

Briefing
In pairs, conduct research on a topic of your own choosing, in which
you will create a speculative design through design research.

Concept
During our topic exploration, we came up with the question:
What if through fungi growing on your body you could cure diseases?
This raised many follow-up questions for us, such as do they grow in visible places? How do you deal with this? Do you look down on someone if he has this 'cure'?
With time, does this change the ideal of beauty? 
With these questions in mind we kept ourselves busy for five weeks.

Final product

Explanation of Living Sarah 
Imagine that your life as a terminal cancer patient can be changed to core health with one injection. There may be some side effects involved, but this means that you can then stay together with your family and friends for many years to come. But what if that one decision changes your whole way of life? 

Today, unfortunately, there are still terminal diseases, think for example certain types of cancer, for which unfortunately we have not yet found a cure. There is plenty of research going on for this, and one of those studies found that certain types of fungi can do things we never imagined, such as regenerating nerves. 

Living with Sarah is a design that thinks about the possible consequences, should these fungi make their way into our health care. The design wants you to think about what an everyday situation, such as breakfast, will look like if Sarah, the fungus, lives with you. How will you deal with this and would you choose this to heal from your terminal illness? How does your social image change? 

By linking fungi with its bad image to the sterile world of medicine, we hope to create friction. Regularly, people associate fungi with dirty, strange and dead. Indeed, we tend to think of how a fungus processes our rotten sandwich rather than how fungi provide new life. 

Wet natural chamois was chosen as the material. This imitation of a mold creates a smooth and fleshy feel. To enhance this effect, we also used wallpaper glue powder. Adding this to the surface of the wet natural chamois makes the surface even more slippery and the undissolved powder quickly leaves marks.

Process photos

We experimented a lot with how to make a fungus feel. How does this feel on a body? After much trial and error, we found that the best way to achieve our desired effect was to use natural chamois and wallpaper glue together. You can see this in the product photos.