Meredith Bickett + Audrey Hunt

In a near-future North America envisioned by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake, the world is controlled by corporations that produce biotechnology for use in the health and beauty fields that market to a youth-obsessed society. These corporations have secured compounds, where their higher-level employees and their families live their entire lives. Outside of the compounds, the area known as the pleeblands consists of an environment ruined by climate change, leading to a rise in temperature, increased sea level rise, and contaminated air and water.


The design speculates on a personal survival architecture for a character in the book, Sharon, who escapes the corporation compounds to live and protest in the pleeblands and how she might use her knowledge of biotech to subvert common health and household products that already exist in the world of the corporations. The constructed products and advertisements reiterate the desire for perfect femininity and health put manufactured by the corporations. Through simple sartorial technologies and thinking past first-life uses of mundane products, the body architecture imagines how Sharon might re-engineer these products to survive in the pleeblands, undermining the power of the corporations through the re-use of their own means of control. Through video and medically-imaged scans, the project shows the redesigned products and speculates on how Sharon might work through the process of “hijacking commodities” for survival outside of the compounds.