Hongjie Yang

Department: Contextual Design
Website: www.hongjieyang.nl

The Oneness of Existence

This project investigates the design implications of human tissue engineering.

In this emerging strand of biotechnology, grafts of human tissue grow in vitro on a three-dimensional scaffold. I envision that tissue engineering will open up new aes-thetic and perceptual possibilities within design.

The realisation that our cells can be made to grow into artificially designed forms can lead us to a new frontier. We will be able to derive objects from ourself. And these ob-jects will share the exact same material properties and genetic codes of our bodies.

I believe this means that the socially coded distinctions between man and objects will collapse. We are exploring the formation of a new class of objects, ‘semi-human’ ob-jects. A new kind of existence that is part-object and part-human.

The formation of semi-human objects has serious implications for ethics and philoso-phy. I propose that we are faced with a new vision of ‘the sublime’, the experience of the awe-inspiring, the unsettling, disturbing caused by the inseparable relationship be-tween you and the object.

The project was conducted both in the lab (from the scientific perspective) and as a conceptual design practice (to bring in the speculative perspective), in order to arrive at an overall understanding of the limitations and possibilities of tissue engineering in design.