Lotta Julkunen
MA work
MA work
Flair
Flair explores new connections between the brain and the body, empowering its user with increased body sensing in motion and a novel body experience. Imagine sensing delicate differences in motion based on the tactile stimuli from your skin, or being able to precisely pinpoint gentle airflow in the environment. Flair is made of bristles that are in contact with your skin. It’s based on increasing proprioceptive signals from the body through tactile sense, as your skin detects vibrations and changes in tension of the bristles.
Flair is based on enhancing the existing abilities of the human body, without electronics, creating a superpower out of your tactile sense.
Info
Info
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MA Degree
School
School of Design
Programme
MA Innovation Design Engineering, 2015
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Contact
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+358 445470217+44 (0)7463 302751
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How often do you concentrate on the sensory messages your body is sending your brain? My final project, Flair, investigates the mind-body dualism in the context of body control and body understanding. In extreme pleasure or extreme pain, the brain can hardly disregard the body, but what if you had the ability to enhance your body sensing at will?
The body has never been as hot a topic and as little used for physical labor as in the 21st century. We experience our bodies mostly in front of a computer, in a sitting position for a majority of the day. Physical exercise has become a consumer product, a million-pound industry for gyms and a million-pound loss for the public health sector, as people suffer from side effects of neglecting their physical selves.
Flair is based on increased proprioceptive signals through tactile sense. The human body has remarkable capabilities in sending, receiving and interpreting signals between the brain and the body. The touch sense, as an essential part of proprioception, body understanding and awareness, is often overlooked.
Although technology has given way for electronic data gathering and sensing in humans, I strongly feel that the capabilities humans possess as highly sophisticated biological machines are far more advanced than manmade devices. I don’t see a cyborg future as a dystopia, but find it amusing how humans trust man-made sensors over biological ones, when we are still incapable of engineering a human body. This respect for evolution, so to speak, pushed me towards enhancing existing abilities of humans, instead of creating new ones using electronic sensor technology.
Flair is completely based on enhancing the existing abilities of the human body, without electronics, creating a superpower out of your tactile sense.
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Degrees
- BA Industrial Design, Lahti University of Applied Sciences, 2012
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Exhibitions
- Work in Progress Show, Royal College of Art, London, 2015; Rio Tinto Sports Innovation Challenge Exhibition, London, 2014; Go Global Design Exhibition, Tel Aviv, 2014