PLANETARY PROSTHETICS

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a "crisis of imagination," the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies—specifically the Kalātattvakośa- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as animate participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Mechanics, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. Utilizing a strategy of Subtractive Participation, the object eschews traditional data-output in favor of an interface that captures the ultra-litho sound of lithospheric beings and generates a quantum field to facilitate the human body's sensing of lithospheric communication. Through sensing technologies that capture low-frequency environmental sounds, the artifact enables an embodied encounter with the Zero Time of geological matter.

Rather than translating nature into consumable data, the device proposes a state of Passive Resonance between the human nervous system and the deep-time consciousness of the Earth. Positioned at the intersection of Critical Design and Indigenous ontologies, this work acts as a provocation, asking how technology might evolve from an instrument of extraction into a tool for listening, resonance, and kinship with the planet’s silent citizens