Mateusz Boruc (He/They)
As a designer, I am fascinated with the effect products have on people and vice versa.
‘We are what we eat’, but I believe that how and with what we eat defines us much better than the common phrase. Due to my international academic background, I have been able to study design and test myself alongside my skills in different cultures.
I advocate for individuality and fairness and strive to uphold these key values in my design. In my final project (Argon) I decided to focus on helping to preserve the sense of dignity among ageing and motor-impaired people. I refuse to accept the dehumanizing effects of weakened bodies on their owners’ minds. As a result, I have combined human enhancement and user experience to create a product that is not only a solution to the problem but a desirable tool as well.
Contact
Projects
Collaborative Work
Argon: Dignifying Augmentation
‘Argon’ is my final, self-initiated project. The name is both the project’s title and the name of a developed brand and the concept proposition.
The context of my project is human augmentation – a process of improving mental and physical capabilities. My interest in the topic is around issues of impairment and restriction of mobility in people from all age groups, but particularly the elderly. I believe it is important to challenge the restraints of the human body on both our physical and mental wellbeing. Therefore, in this project, I aimed to develop products and a brand that would offer augmented products and service that would preserve a person’s sense of dignity and wellbeing as they age and encounter physical impairment.
In consultation with users and stakeholders, the brand ‘Argon’ emerged with its ‘Ar/Cane’ walking stick. An assistive technology, that challenges the stigma, and negative perception (amongst users) associated with assistive products. ‘Ar/Cane’ is one of a range of products designed to keep users active and safe, whilst providing unique, personal, and desirable functionality. The ‘Argon’ service offers the user the capacity to customize, choose materials, patterns, and augmentative functions to their needs and liking.
Primary Values
H-ID / Health ID
H-ID is a project that utilizes CI (collective intelligence) to challenge cancer and wellbeing in the near future – 2030. The project is based on foundations established with Zuzanna Konieczna and Holly Thomson. As a team, we developed a plausible projection of the futuristic world. We believe that health is going to become a primary value in the world,
to such an extent that it could become a quasi-currency. The emergence of HRF – health risk factor (that could affect where you work or whom you date) is a serious proposition (elaborated further below in the collaborative part) that H-ID is built upon.
H-ID is a health monitoring system. It provides the user 24/7 with their medical data.
It allows the user to track and react to changes in their health. Furthermore, the system connects the users with each other and medical institutions, such as hospitals. As a result, treatment of cancer, and other diseases, is more effective, and ideally dealt with at the earliest stages.
However, the uniqueness of the design is its ‘data donation’ feature. Every user, a living ‘sample and probe’, can donate their medical data to selected research institutions.
The system’s purpose is not only to cure better but to prevent hazards as well. The donated data would allow the network of scientists, architects, politicians, and others,
to find causes of diseases and address them.
H-ID is about medical data’s collection, analysis, presentation and application. It creates technological and cultural challenges. Privacy and effectiveness were addressed through the introduction of an armband. It was a medium powering the chip and connecting it with the rest of the system – a mobile device, and to the rest of the system. Additionally, the armband notifies the user about the major health-related information. Thanks to the solution the chip cannot run out of power, and the data collection is completely under the user’s control. If the user wishes it, they can just take the armband off and no collection or transfer of the data is possible.
The most basic feature of H-ID is collecting medical data and sharing it with its owner. Due to it, the user can observe changes in their health over time. However, it also means that the user can be notified about urgent, potentially harmful observations.
System Map
Personal Wellbeing in Cancer Care: 2030
Future Experiences part 1: Group work
Future Experiences is a project which explores the impact of collective intelligence on the future of cancer treatment in 2030. For the first part of the project, we focused on personal wellbeing, for those living with cancer in 2030. We created a future world, based on speculative research surrounding the future of healthcare, which we carried out as a group.
After the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic the world will be changed forever. The UK will aim to never let something of this severity happen again and to take more precautions in the future.
By 2030 the UK will become a health focused society, and in order to track health risks, the Ministry of Health started calculating health risk factors for every citizen, with the H.R.F (Health Risk Factor). News broadcasts regularly have alerts issued by the ministry of health. This is all so people with high HRF can take necessary precautions whenever they might be exposed to danger to their health, for example rising cases of flu in their area or pollution cloud.
