Deconstructed Narratives
The stories within our objects are cryptic and hidden, relayed to their users through impenetrable serial numbers, QR codes, and binary prose.
The reverberations of ephemeral desire; for speed, reflective surfaces, lightness, echo across an invisible industrial landscape, a constellation of space and activity, lasting only as long as the want that conceived it. Material decisions made at the scale of circuitry have repercussions that can change global political relations, create or divert wealth from nation states, and move entire landscapes across the earth’s surface. Product design is landscape design.
SCN1 1711 MPT AC is the sole lyrical document of a story that spans the globe. A gleaming piece of technology designed exclusively to instigate an extraordinary sequence of fictional events that play out across time and space at a global scale. In its creation, vast sites of inverted civic space are mined, continental ties are forged, floating mineral markets undulate with the tides, informal refineries green the dry savannah.
Told through a series of micro-narratives, and represented in traditional 5x4 photographic format, the portraits of these uncertain landscapes are parametrically tied to the decisions made at the design stage, revealing a new lens to view the successes and failures of product design in a climate of globalisation.
Narrative Chart
Serial narratives plots the complex fictional trajectories of the production of three elemental metals all instigated by the design of a single product on their way to a final assembly point at a Chinese owned factory in Maputo, Mozambique.
Thortveitite Monument, Befanomo, Madagascar
The Befanomo region of Madagascar is one of two known scandium deposits globally. As prices rise on the London Metals Exchange due to the design of a new electronic device, wise to the opportunity, the locals seek their fortunes.
Spread thinly, and difficult to access with heavy machinery, only the most light-footed of prospectors could expect to benefit from the sporadic outcrops of these granite pegmatites. The complex attracts the villagers of Saka 12km east. As they extract the ore, they carve sculpted monuments to their good-fortune into the earth that gave it to them, of unimaginable indulgence to any other culture but theirs.
NICKEL China Non-ferrous Metals Association Industry Nickel Mine Entry Gate
Two miners share a ride to work at the Chinese Non-Ferrous Metal Industry Association Copper mine.
Undisclosed location, Botswana
Illegal small scale refineries are being constructed with haste on the plains of Botswana. Black smoke billows into the twilight, as the workers churn through raw rock by night so as to avoid alerting the authorities to their practices.
NICKEL
Nova Cidade de Tibete, Mozambique
Maputo
A crowd of workers, workshy, and school children assemble at 6AM on the Nairbi-Mombasa highway, waiting for their Matatu driver to take them from their suburban dwellings to the City centre.
Indian Ocean, Mombasa
Dawn on the Indian Ocean, the CMA CGM Andromeda leaves the port of Mombasa for Shanghai, on its way out to the open ocean it passes the early morning chaos of 450 container boats delivering their cargo to be shipped to Asia.
Shanghai Mall, Shenzen
Manufactured Landscapes
Parametrically tied to the material decisions made a world away, each atomised landscape is calculated and visualised according to desires for thinness, lightness, reflectivity, and speed, and the geological footprint that is removed to fulfil these desires.
