Five Ideas I Had in 2022 (On Record)

Generated for VIS 162 — a speculative futures and sustainability course — during my junior year, spring 2022. These are five concept sketches, published here largely as found: rough, generative, and mine. Consider this a timestamp. Maybe I'll revisit them in the future.

Speculative design courses produce a lot of ideas that never go anywhere. That is not a failure of the form — it is the point. The value is in the generating, the articulating, the moment of writing something down and discovering whether it has enough internal logic to survive a sentence. Some of these went further than others. All of them are mine (some inspired from external sources), and here they are.

1. Biological Architecture San Diego is growing, livable space is contracting, and the construction industry remains one of the most wasteful sectors of the built environment. The proposal: buildings designed from biological and ecological materials from the outset, with end-of-life repurposing built into the structure. When a building is demolished, its materials re-enter a cycle rather than a landfill. Ecology is not an aesthetic addition to architecture — it is a structural principle. Given the increase in natural disasters and the growing pressure to reduce construction waste, this felt less like speculation and more like a question of timeline.

2. The Food Waste Ban San Diego bans food waste. Not as a punitive measure, but as a systems redesign — drawing from old Asian and indigenous practices of full-use food culture, the French bakery model of recycling stale bread, biodegradable packaging mandates, and tax incentives for businesses that meet ecological agricultural standards. Sea level rise is already affecting agricultural land. Cell-based food alternatives are making progress but haven't resolved the waste problem upstream. The ban is the forcing function that makes the rest of the system reorganize.

3. The Home Hospital Interface More pandemics are coming. The supply of medical professionals is not keeping pace with demand. The proposal: a home-installed interface that connects patients to doctors remotely for routine checkups, with AI delegating and triaging minor assessments. San Diego, with its existing medical infrastructure, is positioned to pilot this. The complications are real — EHR security, HIPAA compliance, the limits of remote diagnosis — but they are engineering problems, not conceptual ones. The concept is sound. The execution requires honesty about what remote medicine can and cannot do.

4. Personal Public Transportation A limit on personal vehicle ownership changes the transportation landscape entirely. This proposal imagines a network of self-navigating personal boards — individual, automated, available at distributed locations throughout the city, requiring no manual maneuvering — as the replacement for both private cars and the existing scooter-rental model. You summon one, it takes you where you need to go, and returns to circulation. The distinction from existing shared mobility is that these are genuinely personal in experience while remaining public in infrastructure — no driving, no parking, no ownership.

5. Space Mimicry Rooms This one overlaps with the synthetic sensing concept from VIS 161, which tells you something about where my head was that quarter. Pressure from the space race — both governmental and commercial — is accelerating demand for environments where experiments can be conducted and training can happen without the resource cost of actual space travel. AR/VR rooms that simulate orbital or planetary environments, accurate enough for meaningful scientific work and accessible enough for educational use. The side effect: broader public access to the experience of space, which changes the cultural relationship to it in ways that are hard to predict and probably worth thinking about.