How Love & Technology Can Save the World | Global Living Room
Our April Global Living Room featured HATCHer, activist, architect, inventor and urban planner, Guto Requena.
“When you lead with love, it’ll meet you there.”
– Guto Requena
Thoughts from Guto
- Think beyond form & function to evoke and spread empathy
- Adding diversity to his team led to a changed perspective and approach to projects
- Technology should support love and connection
- Adding technology to the surface of a city brings the opportunity for added thought and reflection
- You can always find a way to share your message in your work
Examples of Love & Technology working in harmony
work by Estudio Requena
My Heart Beats Like Yours – ‘My heart beats like yours’, taps into the power of empathy and design-as-activism to create a tribute to the LGBT+ community in Brazil. The large-scale interactive piece is a hybrid between public urban furniture and sculpture, set in São Paulo’s iconic Praça da República, where the first meeting of the LGBT+ activist community took place (1978) and where the diversity and inequalities of Brazilian society is visible every day.
Emotional Stimulus – The work Emotional Stimulus invites these six people to participate in an interactive audiovisual experience, in which information from each participant is collected in real time, and returned to the group as graphic and sound responses on the table surface, created based on beats, pulses and emotions from each one of these human circuit members. It is an interactive immersive installation that invites visitors to connect with themselves and others to reflect on the quality of our connections, exchanges and affections with the people and the cities we live in.
Heartbits App – Heartbits is an app that collects heartbeats and sends them to those you love. Just cover the phone’s back camera with your index finger, relax and think about this person. The app collects your heartbeat through the pulse on your finger and turns this data into sound (your heartbeat), vibration (the phone will vibrate in real time) and a 15-second video. At the end of this capture, you can type a small message and send it to that person you really want to give a hug and say: I miss you, you are important to me.
Questions to Ponder
What are WAYS YOU CAN ACCELERATE the SPREAD of EMPATHY AND LOVE?
How might we ADD MORE LOVE and EMPATHY to our SPACES and INDUSTRIES?