Jenna Witzleben

MFA Thesis Blog

This blog contains experiments, project and reading reflections, unanswered questions, and more relating to my year-long thesis as part of my Master's design program. From Sept. 2016 to May 2017, I explored rewilding human beings and the environments we inhabit at multiple scales including investigation around individual fears of nature, regional food production systems, and global overpopulation. The final works of this thesis can be found in my portfolio.

Reflection of Speculative Everything

While reading Speculative Everything by Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne a few weeks ago for the 3D Product Design course, a few questions arose on the strategy and goals of my thesis. In the book, Dunne and Raby cite a couple examples of biotech implemented for sustainability purposes. This brought up the question for me of whether natural augmentation and improvement is actually "better" than technological or biotech augmentation. We could use biotech augmentation to allow us to eat more sustainable sources of food. But this introduces the threat of unknown and unintended consequences. This led me to wonder: what are those consequences? Should we not design something if it may have unintended consequences? Is rewilding the "safe" answer"? Why rewilding actually the better route?

Jenna Witzleben