Wifi Antenna
Project, Design
Franklin St Studio worked with the Everyday Design Studio led by Professor Ron Wakkary out of Simon Fraser University to design and build folding stands for their Woven Wifi Antenna project. The stands support a specialized tapestry that enhances the wifi signal of an associated router and cables. The stands were showcased at Dutch Design week in 2023, then deployed across Europe and North America for ongoing field research in more-than-human centered design.
The Everyday Design Studio describes the Woven Wi-Fi Antenna as a series of woven textiles that are antennas for a wireless router. The pattern of the textiles is designed to be visually perceptible by bees based on bee perception research. The antennas are called “disjunctive” because they bring together unrelated ideas like wi-fi and bees. Wi-fi is invisible and solitary bees go unseen. Yet in urban contexts, the two intersect constantly, invisible to us beyond our perceptions and attention. The antennas bring together the unseen complexities of pollination ecologies and urban technicity, to make them visible for us to negotiate our role in multispecies entanglements.
Photography
References
Wakkary, R. (2021). Things We Could Design: For More Than Human-Centered Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: The MIT Press.
Wakkary, R. (2023, November 8). What might it mean for us to move past human-centered design? Retrieved from Design Denmark: https://designdenmark.dk/what-might-it-mean-for-us-to-move-past-human-centered-design/