Equilibrium

If you could trap a moment of a painful sorrow or a deep joy, in what form would you like to keep it?

Equilibrium is a biological wearable for emotional wellbeing, exploring how designing with biology can allow new sets of affordances and ways of expressing and interacting with the artifacts.

Equilibrium was designed in collaboration with a biologist, that uses a biochemical process between crystalized lysozyme, a protein present in human tears, and gold nanoparticles, embedded inside of a wearable. Once the components interacted with each other they created feedback that is visible as colorization of a wearable, acting as a way to commemorate chapters in life.

Crystalizing tears and turning them into gold, both metaphorically and literally. Showcasing how a wearable made of living things could allow us more humane, poetic, and symbiotic relationships, compared to the transactional interactions we currently have with wearables based on computation.

Beyond that, this project is opening a field of what could be possible in the context of designing with biology and biological matters, how we are going to use them, and what kind of relationship we could build, as we move from machines to organisms, from pixels to cells.

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Ivan Kunjasic

Ivan is a designer and researcher, recently graduated MFA in Interaction Design at Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden. Genuinely interested in biotechnology, biodesign, and benevolent business models.

As an Interaction designer, he’s fascinated by the affordances of mediums, exploring how to use biology to move from machines to organisms, from pixels to cells. In his practice, Ivan finds himself being a mediator between different disciplines. Collaborating with biologists and engineers on bio-based wearables, innovate purpose-driven products and ventures at IDEO, worked for numerous startups in which some of them he co-founded. At the core, he’s a mere human, and he founds beauty in that.