Project Synthia
Speculative Post-AI Future Robotics
ROLE
Lead Creative Technologist
TEAM
Harvard REAL Lab team
Harvard REAL Lab team
TIMELINE
13 months (Feb 2024-Mar 2025)
TOOLS
Overview
Project Synthia, by the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL) at Harvard, is a case study in emergent design methodology—an approach that treats collaboration as a dynamic system, where outcomes are not imposed but negotiated.
Here, design is framed as an act of assembly, shaped by a multiplicity of voices rather than a singular vision. This exhibition reflects an evolving synthesis, mediated by the tensions and harmonies of interdisciplinary thought.
ExhibitionAn Experiment in Emergent Design
Synthia emerges from the intersections of geology, futures study, cognitive science, physics, art, design, architecture, history – each discipline contributing fragments to a larger, unresolved puzzle. The exhibition draws inspiration from radical experiments in design methodology, from Bruno Munari’s Da cosa nasce cosa (from one thing comes another) to the interdisciplinary ethos of Gyorgy Kepes, Chicago’s New Bauhaus, and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). Like these predecessors, it challenges the notion of authorship and control, embracing uncertainty as a generative force.
At its core, Project Synthia is a meditation on assembly—of ideas, artifacts, and histories. It traverses time and discipline, collapsing distinctions between past and future, human and machine, simulation and materiality. It is both an excavation and an invention, a recognition of the mess we have made, and a proposition for how we might make sense of it.
ExhibitionSynthia’s Appendages
Work contributed by Kevin TangExhibition
Synthia Time
Work contributed by Amelia Gan and Sean NakamuraPrototyping