A&D ANNUAL 2022

Max(ine) Booker

Max Booker's practice currently sits within a multi-disciplinary space, utilising their design tools from an array of both physical and digital mediums. ‘In(visible) De-generation' confronts existing by-products of our designed world – one being stimulation. External stimulation impacts our cognitive-emotional functions, governing our perceptions of reality and discouraging imagination, causing an influx of negative stimulation affecting our neurological passageways. This project confronts these negative stimulations by merging design variables and Gestalt principles with technical components that estimate levels of stimulation. Implementing that data back into the project as a perception-based visual installation, the levels of stress a space holds can be changed, without needing to do so structurally. The pre-existing space is transformed through perception of the viewer. Reactions are dependent on the volume of foot-traffic at one time – widening and contracting, or lengthening and centering the space. This integrates seamlessly and invisibly into the space, making positive changes to the negative impacts caused by over-stimulation. This speculative design system confronts pre-existing design flaws, inverting them to reduce the effects of over-stimulation in public spaces.