Leven Voor Een  Ander

Speculative Design

This design was created in collaboration with Joyce Korll

Leven Voor Een Ander is a speculative design that imagines a future where as a result of genetic manipulation, organs can be grown and collected without the donor dying. Because there’s a surplus of donor organs that will come as a result of genetic manipulation, organs will be sold in supermarkets. This results in organs not being seen as the valuable item they are. This design is a speculative advert reminding people of the value of organs and remember that a person that ‘grew’ the organ for them.

This assignment was given by the Amphia Hospital in Breda. They wanted us to create a speculative visual that was connected to an area of healthcare. In the Netherlands, healthcare is overworked. A big part of this work is people waiting on donor organs needing constant care until a new organ is available. We looked at emerging trends in this part of healthcare and started to imagine “what if?”. For these what if’s we created visuals to illustrate this speculative future. We chose the one we found most intriguing and most plausible. During this project, the first human heart grown inside of a pig was transplanted in a human patient. That made it clear for us that this “what if” is the one we had to go with.

A plausible result of being able to grow plenty of organs, is humans not seeing how valuable organs are. In the day and age of capitalism, you will be able to buy your organ in the supermarket. Our speculative design is an advert by a company that wants people to remember that someone grew the organ for them. For this we designed a quality mark that would be placed on retail organs to show how “healthy” the organ is. Did they live healthy or did the person who grew the liver drink every weekend?

For this visual we 3D printed an anatomically correct heart file that we found online. We created a label based on the label of the meat in our local supermarket. On here, we added the life information of the person, a disclaimer to keep it cold and our quality mark. We put this in a food container, put foil over it and placed our label on there to create a realistic food item for a supermarket. We also went to our supermarket to take some photos for the final spread we had to create.

The final images and the spread are not meant to solve the problem we are conversing about, but to open a discussion. We want to encourage people to think more about what they can do for healthcare and if this future really is the one we are aiming for. The final result incentives and is interesting to look at. It was an interesting way as a designer to make our opinion on a subject known and get other people to create an opinion based on facts.

The final spread and images.