Design impossible products, potentially feasible from a technology standpoint. I focus on UX AI patterns rather than shapes to help people become digitally autonomous. Making sense and augmenting sense through inevitable conversations with enabling technologies is my practice. I hold open-ended dialogues with amazing human beings since orality and written text are my favourite learning mediums.
This is the journal of a design & art practice by Sandra Ka, temporary intern at OBOT collective. I just started as an intern at Obot, exploring concepts and experiences around the body. I'm looking at how contemporary technologies — not just AI — can help us build new archives of knowledge, both individual and collective, about our bodies.
I started this website to document the steps and experiments around a device (or maybe a series of devices) that support a study called Longitudinal Me. It's an investigation into how we can make sense of our health and bodies by integrating multiple factors.
The outputs are an impossible project and an unsellable product. The outcome is an architecture for a local, distributed infrastructure and an AI experience to support people's digital autonomy. And not just in political terms, but everyday life modality of managing information and decisions as individuals and collectivity.
Longitudinal Me
I recently came across something called longitudinal studies in healthcare. Basically, it's when researchers follow the same people over time to see how their health changes.
I know that being a woman with a reproductive system isn't some kind of disease that needs constant monitoring. But the project I'm working on — Longitudinal Me — is going to feel a lot like one of these studies. I'll be tracking different things about my body and health over time.
I do not want to track and make sense of different sources of information coming from or attached to my body. I would like to discover if I can augment my way of perceiving my body and using it as a device that is more intelligent when supported by conversations with technologies, the environment and the people I interact with.
I'm not sure yet how I'm actually going to do this. Obviously, it's just me, not a group of people. I also believe that in the end I am not giving back a lot of knowledge if the whole experiment revolves around my body. But maybe if I start paying attention now, I'll notice patterns I never saw before. Who knows?
I'm starting with this diagram. Honestly, when I think about my reproductive health at 25, all I think about are the pills I take every month. Ibuprofen, mostly. It's made me realize I usually only tune into my body when something hurts.
