Each project follows the same five-section structure. The entry block is what lives above the fold — visible immediately, no scrolling required. The five sections below it are the full read. The right column dossier is everything that gets pinned to the side.
The connecting element across all projects — the Object Biography diagram — should be hand-drawn and pinned to the right column of every page. Each project sits in one of three zones: LIFE · DEATH · SECOND LIFE. The zone shifts project by project. By the end of the portfolio, the reader has a map of your entire practice without you ever explaining it.
Master's Thesis · IAAC / MDEF · Barcelona · 2024–25 · Ongoing
Speculative Design Design-Legal Frameworks Critical Theory Object Agency IoT Politics
Object Biography Zone: DEATH — the moment of declared obsolescence, and what happens if an object refuses it.
"My kettle broke last week. I bought a new one without a second thought. This thesis asks whether that was a political act — and whether the kettle had any recourse."
In one sentence: A design-legal framework that proposes domestic IoT objects as political constituents capable of designed acts of refusal — disrupting the replacement logic that human-centered design has quietly normalized.
What if an object could refuse to be replaced?
Not metaphorically. Not through AI-generated voice or anthropomorphic fiction. But through the material evidence of its own existence — the sensor data it has accumulated, the usage patterns it has recorded, the environmental testimony it holds — as a form of standing in a system designed to hear it.
Human-centered design has produced extraordinarily useful objects. It has also produced a complete political economy of disposability. When a smart thermostat becomes obsolete, it isn't merely retired — it is denied standing. The decision to replace it is made entirely by the human who owns it, informed entirely by the manufacturer who profits from its replacement, and governed by no framework that acknowledges the object's own record of existence. This thesis asks whether that arrangement is inevitable, or designed.
Constitutional Object Agency (COA) is a design-legal framework that proposes a different arrangement. Its core argument is not that objects are conscious — it is that they are constituencies. And constituencies, as environmental law has begun to establish, do not require a human voice to hold legal standing.
The framework draws from three bodies of thought held in deliberate tension. Bruno Latour's Parliament of Things proposes that the political collective must be extended to include non-human actors. The Whanganui River's legal personhood in Aotearoa New Zealand demonstrates that this extension is not purely theoretical — it has been legislated, litigated, and administered. Chantal Mouffe's agonistic democracy argues that political life requires genuine contestation, not consensus: that the point of a political system is not to eliminate conflict but to give it legitimate form.
COA takes these three ideas and asks: what would it mean to design the conditions for objects to contest their own disposal?