alienation anxiety insecurity

emotional prostheses

insecurity prosthesis

(The insecurity prosthesis is a work in progress... all shots are of a sketch for form. Hopefully it will be updated soon!)

The third space that I wanted to address in this space was insecurity. While in many ways this kind of feeling is similar to anxiety, it has enough differences in how it is expressed While anxiety is a feeling that seems to come from external stressors, and should therefore be an outwardly expressed interaction, insecurity, to me at least, seems to be an expression of inner turmoil and self doubt. For this reason, the insecurity prosthesis's interaction is exclusively about the user/patient, although it has implications to those around it as well.

The insecurity prosthesis is a large, bulbous object that is worn around the neck, resting heavily on the chest. Inside of it is a warming mat with four settings: OFF, LOW, MED, and HIGH. Originally, the concept for this object was that it would be made from silicone sheets, sealed air tight and filled with water. Unfortunately, my fabrication skills were not quite up to the task, and the idea of a water-filled bladder with an A/C heating pad attached to the underside was a little to unsafe even for an insecurity prosthesis. At the time of this writing, a final version is not yet constructed. However a prototype version was built. The pictures in this section are of the sketched out prototype, not of the upcoming final version.

Conceptually, the insecurity prosthesis is a warm, tethered weight that restrains as it comforts, freeing the user/patient to move on from their cyclical thought while keeping them within the range of the power cordŐs reach of an electrical socket. This is how the insecurity prosthesis is built to both represent, embody, and mediate feelings of insecurity: it is large enough so that it cant be easily hidden or stowed away, meaning that user/patients would need to carry it out in the open. Further, it requires an outlet, meaning that it needs to exist in either a designated space always plugged in, where it would be less than useful outside of the home, or it would exist as an awkward traveling companion, where if a user/patient needed to avail itself of its services, he or she would need to try and find an outlet and stand around until they felt like they could continue on with their day.