TELEPATHY, regeneration, editing memories and visiting virtual worlds may sound like science-fiction, but Victoria University design students are helping to bring the future to reality with their project, Virtual Voyage.

Seven teams of students are showing off their projects at a public exhibition at the Film Archive, which explores how humans might interact with the world 40 to 80 years from now.

Through a high-tech video presentation, models and photographs, Jamie Mayne (21) and his group Being Human showed a glimpse of a future where symbiotic beings are connected with human thoughts and senses.

The Being Human team is pictured above, from left: Rory Rackham, Ashlee Jones, Paul Stevenson, Jamie Mayne, Gina Rawlings, Juliette Wanty and Tania Hockings.

“We’re really focusing on the question ‘can an intelligent entity be more intelligent than the intelligence that created it’,” he says.

“We didn’t answer it with a simple yes or no question – I think we were just exploring that question”.

At right is model Sahra Smith in a work by Jamie Mayne, illustrating a layer of insulation grown from the pores of the skin.

The course is taught by senior lecturer Ross Stevens, who admits he has been obsessed with the future since the beginning of his career.

“What we are trying to do is provocative, but to really be provocative I think you need to make people believe it’s possible.”

The image at left by Paul Stevenson  shows digital render demonstrating the enhancement of one’s senses.

Ideas like flying cars are ridiculous, and that the course is meant to be radical – but not unrealistic, he says.

Students based their visions of the future on leading research in nanotechnology, biology, physics, and computer science.

Group Info used sophisticated digital imagery to imagine a world where people can communicate with touch and people’s consciousness can be stored on a USB stick.

Puf (whose image is shown below right) envisioned a future where human physiology changes dramatically. Limbs would become unnecessary and when people grow old they are reborn as seeds to go on living in a virtual world for 100 more years.

Each year the course partners with a business which provides funding in exchange for student work that will challenge the company’s direction, while providing conceptual designs the company can use for promotional purposes.

Mr Stevens, along with Victoria University industrial design programme director Simon Fraser, travelled to Portland, Oregon, to meet Nike USA, which agreed to sponsor the course in 2007.

The students produced concepts for Nike under the theme Hello Cybernetics, which ranged from fabric that dynamically reacts to music, to controlled body mutations that allow people to exist in cold and hot environments.

Besides Nike USA, New Zealand companies Methven and Fisher & Paykel have sponsored Design Led Futures.

This year the course was unable to find a sponsor, which Mr Stevens attributes to the recession, but he says Design Led Futures will continue to seek international partners in coming years.

Mr Stevens believes as a young country, New Zealand is open to big changes, and New Zealanders are in a unique position to lead the world in this type of thing.

His hope is that in 2012 Design Led Futures becomes a masters-level programme, with a focus not just on quoting researchers, but also developing co-research with them.

Future-seekers can visit the website to explore the work of more than  200 students from this year’s class and previous years.

Below is another image from the Puf team.

Be Sociable, Share!

•