Microsoft Project : Data Hungry Skin
'Data Hungry Skin' is a critical design project that was completed as a response to a Microsoft brief “Service Meets Social” and was presented as one of the winning projects at Microsoft’s Design Expo 2010 in Seattle, USA.
For a video of the presentation please visit;
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/fs2010/designexpo.aspx
Human Connectivity; Textiles as an interface to enhance human connectivity
Project Scenario
2076
What if communication data itself were to become beneficial to our health even become food?
At the beginning of the 21st century technology began to reproduce itself, causing what is now referred to as the information smog epidemic of the 2030s. When it reached critical levels people were left almost unable to function due to the shear bombardment of data. The body needed to adapt of lose the evolutionary race. Dealing manually with numerous different devices and sources of information became impossible for users; new intelligent devices needed to be developed. Yet there is still the basic human need to feel connected to others.
Kipling D. Williams discussed, in the beginning of the 21st century, the importance of social inclusion and connection stating that; "there may be "social snacks" that provide temporary stopgaps for social hunger when a "social meal" (e.g. interaction with an accepting other) is unavailable."
The natural step was to integrate communication devices into the body itself. Developments in Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology provided a soltuion; the human body has become able to absorb information via the membrane pf the skin.
Feeding the body's need for feeling connected, the cells are the next generation in communication technology. When a piece of data is received the physical reaction of the body, produced by the skin unit, mimics that which happens when the person comes into actual physical contact with another.
Similarly the nanostructures can also convert data to trigger the release of nutrients and chemicals into the blood stream. The body more than ever is an ecosystem dependant on other varied forms of life that are no longer purely artifical or biological but an amalgamation of both. Bodies have become hybrids of engineered design and living mutating biology. The breakthrough of harnessing the data as something that benefits health changed the structure of the body irrevocably; skin has become the the processing unit.
Different types of data have different 'nutritional' values, with junk mail or spam being the same nutritionally as a burger once was, and a message from a lover as nutritionally comparable to that of a 3 course meal.
To be connected is to be well fed.