THE RISE OF BLOBJECTS: WHY DO WE LIKE THEM SO MUCH?
Dom Sebastian

Steven Skov Holt says that “As a cultural construct, blobjects are an idea whose time has come, gone, and already come back again. Blobjects are simultaneously a fad and a trend.” My view is that curvilinear features will always be integral to art & design, just with varying in- tensities and surrealism. The future of blobjects and surrealism in design, specifically product design, is rooted in design fictions – fictional concepts hold the key to the future. It is now up to designers to start thinking in more surreal ways to unlock these new ideas.

GOOD VIBES
Ramon Faura

The large hall had 2000 seats; that night, there was standing room only. There was only one piano on stage, a Steinway of course; but no musician was in sight. Frederick Boscovitz, the pianist, was more than a hundred kilometers away. In fact, the piano that was on the stage was nothing more than a speaker – a large sound box that amplified musical notes sent from elsewhere. Frederick Boscovitz sat in the Philadelphia Western Union office. From there, he played a strange device – the Musical Telegraph or Electro-Harmonic Telegraph, patented by Elisha Gray. In a way it was the first synthesizer; a device that generated sounds with electricity and could transmit them through telegraph cables. Two things: music had become invisible, pure sound; in addition, a new unnatural world threatened to engulf the entire planet, making the word reality insignificant. A third thing: Meanwhile, in Paris, the Impressionists, for many the first avant-garde group, were causing a scandal with paintings that gave a cold shoulder to natural pigments, immersing themselves in the unreality of chemical colors, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow. Good, new waves of color and sound were going to turn the world upside down.

PULSATING SHIELD
Signe Ralkov

Crater colonies
Arranged and compliant
Body of vibrating code
Performing a primordial choreography
A pulsating shield

FLUIDS
Arnau Anglada, Berta Cambra, Judith Gómez

Purity (physical) is not found in any materializable space. Everything the body discharges is automatically considered unclean or impure, regardless of its nature (sexual, digestive, or occurring on its own). All vital actions of the body become unclean. Purity (physical) is neither found inside, full of unclean fluids, nor outside, a dangerous space infected with external uncleanliness. Purity is an ephemeral state that reaches its peak when one finishes the purification process. With its consuming nature, the body will then act, ending the state of purity. Everything that comes out of one’s body and whatever dirties it from the outside will be rejected. Superficial cleaning implies the negation of the internal and the suppression of the external.

TOYS
TAKK, Miguel Mesa

Bringing toys closer to architecture, or rather, identifying the architecture of toys and describing it helps us to renovate our practice, it requires us not to separate the materiality, the possible aesthetics and the technical dimension from the political capacity of architectural artefacts, infrastructures and so forth. This is not about providing a response to a series of specific needs, but rather understanding design as a material mediation associated with many other technologies, agreements, policies, and ecologies, which provide support to the composition of other forms of life and which amplify political capacities and negotiation tools so that other techno-societies are possible.

MOONMISSION 2030
Intergalactic Environmentalists

On February 5, 1971, the Apollo 14 mission landed on the Moon. It was the 8th manned mission in the Apollo program and the 3rd to land on the surface of the Moon. During the mission, various scientific instruments were deployed to collect data about the distance between the Moon and Earth, one of these being the Lunar Ranging RetroReflector (LRRR). To protect it from Lunar dust, the LRRR was sealed in a plastic bag. This bag was left behind on the Moon. As the first misson initiated by the Intergalactic Environmentalists, the objective of MOONMISSION 2030 is to clean up this plastic bag.