By Sean Lally & Brett Balogh
Global environments are evolving from a changing climate and increased population growth while advances in healthcare and consumer devices redefine the human bodies that occupy those environments. As wearable technology and improved healthcare technologies offer increasing access to information, new forms of individuality and community must be explored and questioned in order to better engage the future of designed space.
IZZI is a ‘sensorial figure’ (replacing the scale figure of ergonomics) in both digital explorations within computer simulation as well as physically in prototype scale modeling (seen below). Design space under this approach is explored through tool sets that place human perception and health alongside more traditional techniques that calibrate architectural form or simulate energy performance of space. These current techniques of design exploration often leave the body absent from the design spaces our bodies eventually occupy instead relegating bodies to predetermined norms and statistical averages. IZZI is an attempt to explore new potential relationships between the environments and inhabitants in order to better understand opportunities for design and living that might otherwise go unexplored.
(5” x 4” x Height is Variable)
Each interchangeable ring on IZZI is a unique sensor tied to either current human senses of health and safety or potentially new future sensory perception. Rings are grouped into three categories, ‘health & safety’ which includes testing for air particulates and gases, ‘human senses’ which include current physiological abilities to sense humidity, visible spectrum of light and sound decibels and more and finally ‘artificial senses’ which include being able to perceive information beyond the current abilities of the human body that might soon be available through handheld or embedded devices (see figure 4) Rings can be added or removed depending on who the designer is trying to better understand. IZZI is an attempt to overcome simplified representations and assumptions of the human body. Doing so not only provide additional lenses during the design process to better understand a diversity of people and communities for whom they are designing, but also the information and materials that make up those environments with which people engage.
or potentially new human sensory perception. Rings are interchangeable and can be stacked
or removed depending on that which is being studied or designed.
for the designer to identify intensity of specified sensory input.
