Speculative Stuff
2023 - 2024 - 2025 - 2026 Student Works
* The intellectual property rights of each work are owned by each student.

Emotional Vending Machine












SOOMIN KIM






 “Efficiency” is a thing in which the results are greater than the efforts. Human being lives in an efficiency- oriented society. Many people like to be efficient. Of course, The efficiency has many advantages. For example, a student can save time by studying efficiently. Efficient work makes it easier to make more money. 

However, Is efficiency only just beneficial? There are also many disadvantages in the efficiency. There are many scenes that you miss when you take the subway to have efficient and fast movement. In today, people act too efficiently. People seek efficiency even in the field of they must spend enough time. There is definitely can be worthy things losing if continues to pursue efficiency.

Currently, people are seeking efficiency in many areas. People now consider efficiency not only for work and study, but also for travel, rest, cooking, marriage and meeting people. For example, People use a dating application to meet good person in a short time. They think meeting new people and getting close is a waste of time and emotion. People also seek efficiency in feeling emotions. People watch sad movies to cry. People watch reality variety shows to feel fluttery heart and vicarious satisfaction. People want to feel emotions with minimal effort.

In 2050, South Korea invented the ‘Emoti-Bites’ technology. ‘Emoti-Bites’ technology is a technology that extracts human emotions through fingerprint and iris recognition and injects them into an edible product called “Mood Crystals”. A person who eats ‘Mood Crystals’ can feel the emotions injected into them and no longer waste time to feeling. There are voices of need to buy and sell ‘Mood Crystal’. After that, ‘An emotional dispenser’ that allows people buy and sell’ Mood crystals’ has been developed and appears on the streets. 

People release negative emotions in to the banding machine, or purchase positive emotions from the banding machine. People don’t date or marriage anymore because they can feel love easily. People also don’t feel sadness about the death of family member or other persons due to war or accident. This is because they can easily remove sadness. People don’t need people because they don’t even feel loneliness. Family members’ gatherings also disappear. People forget the importance of bonding with each other.

People in 2050 live efficient lives thanks to banding machines. Let’s think about what humans really get out of this.




2023



Speculative Stuff



Speculative Stuff is a public archive of speculative design works developed through Yonsei University’s Integrated Design courses, 
led by Hyunjae Daniel Shin (Associate Professor) and Eun Sun Park (Lecturer).

The platform documents how undergraduate students begin with small everyday questions — discomforts, contradictions, awkward moments, and social habits we often overlook — and transform them into speculative objects, future scenarios, and critical narratives.

These works are not predictions of the future. They are invitations to look again at the present. By using comedy, exaggeration, absurdity, and preposterous worldbuilding, the projects make familiar systems feel strange and open up alternative ways of imagining technology, culture, society, and the environment.

The course has been shaped by an ongoing pedagogical exploration of Speculative Critical Design, combining futures studies, design research, interactive workshops, and public engagement. It encourages students to move beyond solution-driven design and develop more critical, imaginative, and participatory ways of engaging with alternative futures.

The methodological background of Speculative Stuff is further informed by Eun Sun Park’s doctoral research on the Preposterous Comedy Approach for Speculative Critical Design, which examines how comedy techniques, preposterous futures, and speculative artefacts can support critical thinking, public engagement, and future-oriented design education.

Read the dissertation HERE(EN) (KR)