Your brain manufacturing

Merel Bekking’s design research project investigates what could happen if you create a design based on your inner most feelings by measuring brain activity.

What if you could create a design based on your inner most feelings by measuring your brain activity? Would you like it? How would you relate to it? These where the central questions for Your Brain_manufacturing, a research project by designer Merel Bekking. In this project, Merel Bekking applied her established research and design method Brain_manufacturing to just one individual, design journalist Marcus Fairs. In 2015, Fairs spent an hour in a MRI scanner, which was used as a design tool to directly measure Fairs brain activity to determine what he likes, despite of what he says he likes. In collaboration with neuroscientist dr. Steven Scholte and the Spinoza Centre for NeuroImaging, Bekking discovered that Marcus Fairs’ brain has a strong preference for orange, plastic, closed rounded shapes and chairs.

 

Bekking placed the chair in Fairs living room. For four months Fairs was confronted with the chair on a daily basis. During this time Bekking observed how the relationship between Fairs and the chair developed. Before knowing the results and receiving the chair, Marcus Fairs expressed his doubts about the project, but once confronted with the chair based on his subconscious preferences Fairs was happily surprised. Confused but optimistic he kept repeating: “I like it much more than I thought I would”.

Merel Bekking, Your Brain_manufacturing
Merel Bekking, Your Brain_manufacturing
Four months later Bekking returned to Marcus Fairs to collect the chair. How did the bond between him and the chair develop? Upon arriving, Bekking discovered that things had turned for the worst. “Just after you left it, I think I took a violent dislike to it” is the first thing Fairs told Bekking. He explained that even though he tried to like it, and he appreciated the idea behind it, he just couldn’t seem to find anything positive about it. The chair was never used and he felt it was quite an imposition to have to live with it.
Merel Bekking, Your Brain_manufacturing
Merel Bekking, Your Brain_manufacturing
With this research project, Bekking showed that over time it doesn’t matter that you live with something that is hyper-individual, scientifically based on your personal brain activation. If it doesn’t match what you think you like you can’t force a sentimental bond with things. You can use state-of-the-art science to determine what people subconsciously like, and create designs based on these results. After Brain_manufacturing and Your Brain_manufacturing we now know that what we like can’t be reduced to a simple formula, that would match your every need. Taste and preference are complex matters. It seems that what we like isn’t something that we truly believe or experience but that it is something that is socially constructed. That there are shared assumptions about beauty and preference and that we rationalize our opinions about design and objects by comparing them with the created models of the social world.
Merel Bekking, Your Brain_manufacturing
Merel Bekking, Your Brain_manufacturing

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