This was an interesting exercise, because at first I thought it was too abstract. However, I realized it’s a way for me to discover what’s happening in my subconscious. The words I put down, the games I created and all the iterations for each game revealed to me where my true curiosity lies.

Games:

1. Plant clothes in Hudson Yards:

   revealed my thoughts focus on material design and 3D printing. I thought about using algae, hemp, fungus and yeast to produce material. I also leveraged the location when formulating solutions. (within an urban setting next to water)

2. Teleport to Singapore with Noam Chomsky:

   This started with thinking about different forms a teleporting device could be/work like. The least farfetched and sci-fi like iteration was about virtual teleportation, where Chomsky and I controlled robotic avatars in Singapore and got multi-sensory feedback, as if we were actually there.

3. Learn “Do we need bodies to exist?” from Socrates:

   This one was even more hypothetical than teleportation. It was either about going back in time to ask Socrates, getting his DNA and cloning him in the future or building an AI Socrates to learn from. I can’t see a clear connection between the outcome of this game and my thesis yet… Perhaps I should’ve focused on the question itself.

4. Communicate fast with Rumi’s hologram:

   I guess the main question here was all about fast communication. and the ultimate form of communication that is instant and somewhat lossless would be telepathy. Since here the challenge was to communicate with a computer generated hologram, I could communicate with Rumi’s using a BCI. If not telepathically, I could make and utilize holographic visuals to communicate faster and more seamlessly.

5. Make a “green” spaceship with Elon Musk:

This was an interesting one. Instead of urban farming as a whole, it made me think of creating a closed loop eco system inside a spaceship. A system that is solar powered, that reuses waste water to grow the plants and human waste as fertilizer. This would make an awesome speculative design project…

Research statements:

Path 1: I want to understand the present limitations, constraints, and opportunities afforded by XR technologies and platforms in order to figure out how we can create more intuitive interfaces for mixed reality.

Path 2: I want to understand the current limitations in urban farming in order to figure out how we can create technologies, platforms or systems to facilitate more sustainable local food production and distribution in cities.