Fall 2025 • Nasif Rincon • Professor: Pedro Galvao Cesar de Oliveira

Critical Objects

Ideation session

Class workshop on making objects by modding/combining common ambiguous objects. My selected cards were:

  • Topic: Deforestation
  • Attributes: Connected & Responsive

I only had enough time to make one object, so I opted with the Connected attribute for it:

Plastic bottle with plant watering can head on top.

Speculatively, this is an object that lives in a future where climate change has led to a scarcity and quality of rainwater, causing deforestation to become so widespread that even flora in cities is affected. To mitigate this, citizens are obligated to carry these watering cans at all times. When these light up, they are a remote notification to water whatever plants are nearby. Notifications are managed by government offices keeping track of GPS location of the cans and optimizing city watering efforts based on that.

Project 01: Hungry Mind

3 cards that read 'Edible', 'Happiness' and 'Humor'.

For this project, we decided on the topic of "Attention Economy", and more specifically "Algorithmic Echo Chambers".

Taking Edible more metaphorically, we focused on the "Media Diet" and what a "balanced diet" would be, taking into account that its not really possible to have one.

The final idea was to build a TV dinner tray that, through a screen, would show content from reddit. These posts and comments would be grouped by the ideological stance of their subreddit (based on the database from this paper), into compartments, feeding into the idea of a balanced meal by appropriating the visual of separating nutritional groups.

The TV Dinner tray appeals to how media used to be consumed and in a way adapts it to how we consume media now.

small screen with tape on top, subdividing it.
Testing screen subdivisions
Zoomed in view of epoxy on plastic.
Testing epoxy finish on the plastic 3D to approximate the look of vacuum formed plastic.
Internals of electronic device.
Packing the internals inside the 3D printed case.
Pinup of a project on a pedestal
Pinup.
Pinup of a project on a pedestal
Pinup of a project on a pedestal
People observing an object on a pedestal.
Pyramid with concepts on each vertex and little colored dot indicators inside
The location of the projec in our classmates' opinions.

Project 02:

For this project we were tasked with the device of "Humor". To define our other cards we chose:

  • Device: Humor
  • Topic: Trust in AI
  • Attribute: Disposable
  • Mood: Nostalgic