Designing the future of love
Picture yourself in the high-tech future of romance, where couples outsource their troubles to a corporate caretaker.
ORIGINAL MEDIA SERIES BY STUDIO MALAGÓN
As part of our ‘design fiction’ work, ‘Love, Optimized’ is a multimedia experience imagining the future of love — which has been dutifully overtaken by a corporation called Object Solutions.
Love is re-designed as a seamless consumer experience, thanks to personal drones, smart home surveillance, sensual GPS and neuro-dating.
The initiative provokes burning questions about consumption, intimacy and innovation.
Learn more about Object Solutions, our fictional corporation that drives this endeavor.
OUR ROLE
Creative Direction
Design
Illustration
Writing
collaborators
Shelly Ronen
The inventions forecast an emotional landscape guided by corporate oversight.
The diligent NeurAlign orchestrates your romantic success while the two of you sleep soundly at the first date dinner table.
Served on a silver platter, the neural network choreographs a controlled experiment of your connective potential. Distilled to its neural essence, the first date becomes an algorithmic dance of romantic possibility — in a fraction of the standard time.
The TouchTrainer is a navigation system for your hands across the terrain of your lover’s body, where the journey is just as critical as the destination.
The built-in Corporal Positioning System (CPS) provides reliable directions, guiding participating hands as if they were delivery vehicles with scheduled stops across the body. It indicates traffic signals, suggested speeds and upcoming turns.
The Ring Finger Spotlight is a micro-drone with a mission: to illuminate and document the ring on your finger at all times.
Its everlasting ray of light bestows cinematic brilliance upon your finger, while the on-board video camera keeps constant watch.
While a ring is docked on your finger, family and friends can tune in to the live stream and admire an enduring close-up. If the ring makes a departure, all parties can remain on alert.
With the Intimatum, your smart home becomes a stakeholder in your ongoing romance.
The system administers your home services — from high-speed internet to basic drinking water — granting their access based on your intimacy frequency with your partner.
Abundance of intimacy brings continuous utilities. Absence risks gradual shutdown.
The experiences prepare visitors for a cozy corporate takeover.
Exhibitions provide blueprints and audio guides to set the stage for an intimate future.
Corporate keynotes indoctrinate viewers in a driverless romantic lifestyle.
Romantic consultations solve problems for couples on request.
The book traces the future love stories of commoditized relationships.
Object Solutions skewers the seriousness with which contemporary consumers hope technology might solve emotional problems. It’s all very tempting to believe that one’s inner life might be made easier by external technologies ... Why not employ products like those detailed in Love, Optimized?
DESIGN OBSERVER
Each Object Solutions pitch is wrapped in the sleek salesmanship and storytelling that a real company might employ. Morales does his part ... to make these dystopian devices almost believable. But they’re also almost believable because they’re not all that far from the kinds of pitches that tech reporters like me get every day.
The Daily Beast
Love, Optimized, which feels like a cross between a Rube Goldberg diagram and a Harlan Ellison hellscape, explores potential future technologies that might come to mediate sex and romance – with a touch of whimsy and dread.
Vice Motherboard
The workshops invite two strangers to invent their way into a new romantic future.
Let’s discover what we can do for you.
© Copyright 2008–2021 Studio Malagón & Ernesto David Morales