the designer’s homonculus
A cortical homunculus is a distorted representation of the human body proportional to the areas of the brain dedicated to the control of different body parts. My portrait of the human in the Anthropocene takes the cortical homunculus and turns it into the designer’s homunculus; the most-used parts are the largest. In our age, the human is the most influential species on the planet, and I believe that the designer has a particularly strong influence. Combining this idea with a quote from Beatriz Colomina’s Are We Human, “The human brain has touched and transformed everything it encounters,” my piece shows the control of the human and the designer.
Yale University
Scales of Design, Spring 2024
Professor Bimal Mendes