Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
2 Fantasy Tracking Systems
September 25, 2011
The assignment:
Draw a fantasy QS system of instrumentation. The goal of this assignment is to show your conceptual and sketching process. You will draw/sketch, in whatever way you want (hand-drawn or digital or other method — use your imagination), two fantasy QS systems of instrumentation. (a) One is for your body. (b) One is for whatever else you think might be missing as a way to instrument yourself toward health. (2 SLIDES)
Deliverable details:Create a title for each of your fantasy QS systems. If your sketch is hand-drawn, scan it. Create one blog post and attach your 2 slides (or video).
The first idea stems from an interesting and inspiring article I read in the New York Times back in April that outlines some research conducted in Europe that suggests our health may be more linked to the ecosystem of micro organisms living within our bodies that previously thought. From the moment we are born into the world we begin a symbiotic relationship with one of three types of ecosystems (or “microbiomes”) – each type (called an enterotype) defined by its composition of organisms.
Depending on what we eat and the environment we are in contact with this composition changes over time and greatly affects our health – in ways we are only beginning to understand. We could, in the future use nano technology to monitor these ecosystems and report back on its composition. I don’t have a great understanding of the specific functionality that nanobots might perform to identify each organism – through genotyping or detecting other more easily gathered attributes – but it suffices to say that I believe this to be an extremely powerful area of our health which we know virtually nothing about.
The second idea stems from anecdotal evidence that we are being monitored cameras embedded in billboards that track whether we are paying attention to specific kinds of advertisements or not. Following pretty general systems thinking, just our subjective experience can be considered as much a part of our health as our physical experience, the health of a community can be quantifiable as meaningfully as an individuals. Mood can be spread, just as a virus might, and one bad apple can ruin everyone else’s day. So why sell ads to miserable people when we can sell straight up ice cream? There exists no reason not to.
[image credits: perpetualplum, adonofrio, hmerinomx, Kevin H.]